


Misunderstandings

by AmandaRex



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, FitzSimmons - Freeform, Mack/Hunter/Fitz bros, Resolved Sexual Tension, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-01 09:49:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5201387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmandaRex/pseuds/AmandaRex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even while trying to be completely honest with each other, the strain of working together to rescue Will pushes Fitz and Simmons apart. Jemma decides to leave S.H.I.E.L.D. rather than watch their relationship continue to degrade away to nothing and they both try to move on. A year passes before a threat from an old enemy brings her back to S.H.I.E.L.D. for her own protection. Will they take this opportunity for a second chance to really listen to each other and mend the rift that has pulled them apart?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Threat Emerges

**Author's Note:**

> This should be at least close to canon up to 03x07, though I feel sure that 03x08 will change that. I'm glossing over the leadership politics going on over at Hydra at the moment and going with Ward leading it, or at least pretending to when issuing threats to S.H.I.E.L.D.

Fitz sighed as he moved through the corridors toward Director Coulson's office. He couldn't fathom what was so important that he had to report right bloody now, especially once he'd tried to explain how an interruption during productive work in the lab could put him off schedule for a week or more if it came at the wrong time.

Coulson looked up the moment Fitz appeared in the doorway, as though he'd been anticipating the arrival more than his impassive exterior indicated. "Please come in, Agent Fitz. Close the door behind you."

"If this is about the trackers you asked me to work on, I'm still trying to find a way to get them as small as you wanted them. I'm hitting a few problems—"

"That's not why I asked you here," Coulson interrupted.

"Does your hand need an adjustment? I'll need to go back to the lab and get some tools if you do." Fitz saw the other man fidgeting with the prosthetic he still didn't seem at all comfortable using and felt a bit guilty about being annoyed when he was summoned from the lab. Fitz had tried several approaches that give Coulson more sophisticated digit control but nothing was working as well as he'd like. "I was working on a new schematic yesterday but I shelved it when you and Daisy asked about the trackers—"

"Agent Fitz." Coulson interrupted again, his demeanor making clear that he didn't expect Fitz to speak again until asked. "Have a seat, please."

Fitz shuffled around the chair and sat down, trying to remember the last time, any time even, that he'd been called to the Director's office and a quick status report from the doorway wouldn't suffice. Something about this seemed so formal, including the grim set of Coulson's mouth as he looked at Fitz with a familiar, maddening calm.

"It's about Jemma," Coulson said, once he finally began to talk again.

"Listen, if there's a problem you think we need to bring her in for, let me take a look at it first. I know I'm not an expert in the fields she covered but I have a few contacts and I'm sure it's not necessary to—"

"Leo," Coulson barked, stopping Fitz more with the shock of the Director using his first name than with the impatience in his tone. "There was a message an hour or so ago that came through on an old S.H.I.E.L.D. frequency, one that hasn't been used since before the fall. I think he knew I'd still be monitoring it, that I might be the only one monitoring it."

" _He_ knew...who are you—"

"Ward."

Fitz's fists clenched with an anger that only the mention of that name could stir up. "What does that bastard—"

"I couldn't agree more, but you need to watch this." Coulson tapped a button and the screen behind him flared to life. Ward's face appeared there, wearing a smirk that Fitz wished he could remove with the help of a flamethrower.

"First just let me say hello, Coulson. I know you're seeing this, because you never could give up the old S.H.I.E.L.D. ways, even once you realized how many years of your life you spent being played by an organization you'd never understand. It's sad, how you refuse to move on, but at least it gives me a way to have a little chat with you. I miss our talks. I feel like there's so much I could have learned from you and your team, but I just didn't get the time."

"Turn it off," Fitz spat out. "I don't want to hear anything that son of a—"

"Wait," Coulson said, and pointed at the screen where Ward seemed to be done looking self-satisfied and was about to continue.

"I kind of miss the team. It's lonely at the top, running an organization, but I don't have to tell you that. The camaraderie, you're never really part of it when you're in charge. And don't get me started on how hard it is to find people who don't let you down. I don't know how many people I've tried to let in my inner circle only to be disappointed in them. I really didn't appreciate the old days until now, how good your hand-picked team was. Then I thought, if I can't get my own team, why don't I start working on getting the old one back together?"

"He's insane," Fitz whispered. "What is he raving about?" The pieces started to come together in Fitz's mind as Ward kept talking. Coulson had said this had something to do with Simmons. "She isn't safe! You need to send a team to—"

Coulson tapped another button, pausing the message while they talked. "Hunter and Bobbi are on the way. We've been checking on Jemma's new identity daily since it was put in place and everything seemed solid, but Ward wouldn't drop this on us if he didn't at least have a lead."

"Have you heard anything yet?"

"They're still en route, but we have comms open and I'll be monitoring the operation from here."

"She was supposed to be safe," Fitz muttered, knowing that he sounded like a petulant child but he found himself unable to care.

"This was always a possibility once she left, which is why we we've always been prepared with this op to get her out. We buried her identity pretty deep, but with Jemma's new career not that far from what she was doing here and facial recognition tech getting more sophisticated every day, I'm not that surprised he was able to find her."

"If you thought this could happen, how could you—"

"I can't lock people up when they start talking about leaving S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Fitz, not even for their own safety. Jemma resigning, that was her decision. We tried to make it as safe as possible for her in her new life, but there are limits to what we can do."

"What will our team do when they get to her?"

"We're getting ahead of ourselves, Agent Fitz. We'll talk about that, but I need you to see the rest of the message first." Coulson tapped another button and the frozen image of Ward sprang to life again.

"Most of you are locked up pretty tight, but I recently came into some information that one of you is a free agent, as it were. Surprised to see her going it solo, but then, she always did seem to want something new and exciting. I know you'll show this to Fitz, Coulson, the same way I can predict just about everything you'll ever do. So Fitz, I'm going after her, and I'm going to get her. You want things to be easier on her during her transition, you'll give yourself up and join her here. I'm kind of looking for the matched set, so don't let me down. You won't like what I'll do to her if I get frustrated."

Fitz swallowed down the urge to hunt Ward down and let his hands slide around the bastard's neck, trying to think of something constructive to do instead. "Will's there. He protected her on that planet for months, he'll keep her safe until Hunter and Bobbi get there."

"We'll secure Jemma," Coulson said. "I have some surveillance I've tapped into and she's safe, or at least, she will be for long enough to get the team there. I haven't contacted her directly, but we have a passive code that I've tripped and she knows what to do from there."

"Ward knows you'll send someone for her. It's a trap."

"Of course it's a trap. I'm counting on him covering the extraction plan he'll expect me to use and sending everything he's got at that. We'll use his overconfidence that he has us figured out against him. That's how we're going to get her out."

"You're sure enough to risk her life on it?"

"We don't have any choice. He'll assume you were instrumental in setting up any system we had to keep her safe in her new identity, so he's prepared for tech. He's looking for coded doors, booby traps, sensors, drones, all the tech he saw you create while he was on the team with us."

"If it's not that, then—"

"Oh, we have all of that in place, and Ward's team will start trying to get through it to get to her. That's just a distraction, though. While they're spinning their wheels trying to circumvent that, Bobbi and Hunter will be bringing her out the low-tech way, through an underground passage beneath her building. Even if Ward finds it, it's a maze. Blind alleys, dead ends. It's why we suggested this city and location to Simmons. Bobbi and Simmons have both studied it, so they know it inside and out. They'll slip out like it's nothing while Ward's team is distracted topside."

"If it's handled, why did you bring me down here?" Fitz couldn't help feeling a little useless. Not only was he here while Simmons was being rescued, it wasn't even his tech that was really keeping her safe until they could get to her.

"Ward's after you too, Agent Fitz. His message makes that clear. He'd see capturing Simmons as a win, but it's clearly not as valuable to him as getting both of you would be. I'll lighten your field assignments, but I can't afford to bench you completely. There's just not enough hands around here. When you're in the field, you need to know Ward is gunning for you. And if he gets in here somehow...well, that's a disaster no matter what, but it seems like he'd be coming for you and Simmons."

"Why us and not the rest of the team?"

"That's interesting, isn't it? Maybe it's just because he discovered Simmons had left S.H.I.E.L.D. and he thought he might be able to parlay it into a two-for-one deal, but maybe it's something else. He could be planning something he thinks he needs your expertise for."

"If he thinks for even one second that we'd help him—"

"I think he knows you and Simmons would help him if he applies the right pressure." Coulson looked at Fitz for a long moment and Fitz realized what the other man was getting at.

"You mean if he tortured one of us, right? If he used Simmons to get to me."

"Or you to get to Simmons."

Fitz almost—ALMOST—let himself childishly say something about how Ward would have to capture Will if he really wanted to get Simmons to work for him, but he couldn't quite summon up the angry bitterness it would take for him to mean it. Of course Simmons wouldn't want anyone to be tortured, certainly not anyone she had a personal connection to. Just because she'd chosen to leave and pursue a life outside of S.H.I.E.L.D. and away from their longtime partnership didn't change the compassion Simmons had for any of them.

"Is there a safehouse, somewhere you think she can be protected while we go after Ward?"

"Nowhere safer than here, and I doubt she'll have many reservations about moving into her old quarters once she realizes what the alternative might be."

"But she—of course, you're right, sir." Fitz knew this was the last place Simmons wanted to be, she'd told him as much before she went to Coulson and resigned. They had no idea how much intel Hydra and Ward had on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s assets, so no safehouse could be as safe as the base was.

"Would you like to stay while I monitor the mission? Bobbi and Hunter should be almost there."

Fitz held up a hand to refuse. "I should get back to the lab, work on those trackers you asked for. I can't do any good here anyway."

Coulson looked surprised, but he didn't say anything before Fitz turned around and left the office.


	2. The Return

Back in the lab, Fitz caught himself getting lost in thought yet again, his hands hovering over a few components he couldn't even remember getting out. Simmons was coming back and he had no idea how it was possible to want something so much and dread it at the same time.

"You should get to the hangar," came a deep voice from behind him. "ETA's just a few minutes out."

Fitz spun around to find Mack leaning into the doorway of the lab. "How do you know what's going on?"

"I helped Hunter and Bobbi with mission prep. I don't know the whole story, but I know enough. You should be there when she gets here."

Fitz shook his head. "She'll be uncomfortable enough to be back without me being there."

"Don't wanna argue with you, Turbo, but I think you're wrong. You still have time to get down there, just go."

"I'm so far behind on these, and Daisy really needs them."

Mack gave him a look of slight exasperation, as though this was the answer he'd fully expected but he was disappointed with it nonetheless. It wasn't the first time Fitz had been on the receiving end of that look. "Yeah, okay. Tell yourself that, but I think you're making a mistake."

"Thanks, Mack, but I'm fine here."

Fitz listened as Mack hovered restlessly for another moment or two, not being the type to give up so easily, but he disappeared down the hallway soon enough when Fitz kept up his determined silence.

Mercifully, Fitz was now able to fall into his project, picturing the way each piece of the tracker worked together with the others. He turned the pieces over in his hands under his magnifying lens, looking for new ideas to make them smaller, replace them with something more effective, or change the way they fit together. He loved this part of the work, early on in a project when every idea was worth pursuing and the possibilities seemed endless. No matter how frustrating the rest of his life seemed recently, he'd always have this. His hands flew over his workstation, from the schematics on his tablet to a messy sketch on a piece of paper, back to the physical components. Even at their tiny size they had a weight in his hands that was concrete and reassuring.

"Hello, Fitz." The words were quiet and hesitant, her voice stumbling over just three syllables.

Fitz stiffened, carefully putting the components down in front of him before turning to face the doorway. He took her in, his eyes finding every detail that was different about her and cataloguing it. She'd dyed her hair darker and let it grow out a little, which he assumed was to help obscure her real identity. Her wrists seemed thin where they peeked out from the long-sleeved shirt she was wearing, hinting that she'd also lost a few pounds that she couldn't really afford to say goodbye to. He tried to reconcile the old with the new, but it was difficult to do while he was also trying to pull himself together enough to respond.

"I'm glad they got you out safely." He tried to convey as much sincerity as he could, and it wasn't difficult because he truly was relieved she was out of danger, but his stomach lurched at how pained the smile was that she gave him was in return. 

"Yeah," she said, waving her hands to dismiss the subject as though her rescue from certain capture by their most personal enemy was not a lot to have dealt with for one morning. "Little worrying there for a minute or two, but that's over now."

Fitz wasn't at all sure what to say, so he did the only thing he could do, the only thing he and Simmons had been able to do in the months leading up to their successful re-opening of the portal and their rescue of Will. He went back to his work, letting the room fall into silence.

"What are you working on?" Her voice wavered a little, trying too hard to make something that wasn't a disaster out of this. "Anything I could help with? I haven't been doing a lot of practical work lately, but if there's something I can do while I'm here—"

"It's not a big project, and I don't know if there's a biochem angle." He saw her flinch out of the corner of his eye as he pretended to be distracted by a piece of the torn-apart tracker he held in front of his face, which was clamped in a hemostat he suddenly remembered he'd nicked from her stash of equipment at some point.

"No...of course. I'm sure you have everything well under control here, but if there's anything...don't be shy about asking. I'd be happy to lend a hand." 

She turned to leave, and even though he'd wanted nothing more than for her to leave him alone a moment ago, he found he also didn't want her to be gone. Not like this, with such a curt dismissal.

"So, have you missed…" he started, then trailed off when he looked directly at her and saw the look of hope on her face at the question he had begun to ask her. "I mean, have you missed the more practical work?" He tried and failed to imagine her looking more disappointed than she did before she covered the expression with another pasted-on smile that didn't reach her eyes.

"I'd have to say so." She took a deep breath and faltered for a moment, as though she was choosing her words very carefully. "I really had no idea how much I would miss...the more practical work. The kinds of things you and I used to work on."

That almost got him to call her over to his workstation to have her take a look at the tracker, to see if there was some way to tie in a biometric component that would make it more reliable and allow him to eliminate several parts of the device. The urge to fall back into their old rhythms was strong, to go back to the one thing he knew they could still be to each other. They could work side-by-side and he might almost be able to make himself forget she was only here because her life was in danger. No other force on the planet would have brought her back to him, away from her new life with Will, except for the threat they'd received from Ward early that morning.

"Strange the way things turned out, isn't it?" he asked before he could stop himself. "I was the one who wanted to go into research, maybe teach some classes at the Academy. You wanted the field work, the excitement."

"The travel," she offered, and he saw the first real smile she'd given him since she appeared in the doorway. He was pretty surprised that she could joke about her trip across the universe, even though a year had passed since her return. She seemed lighter than she'd been the last time he saw her. Lighter, but strangely and quietly sad in a way that unsettled him.

"I think you've probably had enough of the travel," he ventured, but he was out of practice with their lab banter and he couldn't think of anything else to say.

"I should say so," she returned, quietly.

"Well, Coulson really needs—"

"I should let you get—"

They'd both began to speak at once and they stopped simultaneously, returning the lab to uncomfortable silence.

"I'll just go and get settled. I'm in my old quarters, if you...if you need anything." She waited to leave until he nodded at her.

To Fitz's credit, he waited until she was out of sight before he put down what he was holding to sit back on the stool behind him, staring at the wall and accomplishing exactly nothing for the rest of the afternoon. 

He was still there a few hours later when Hunter and Mack stuck their heads in the doorway. Hunter held several bottles of beer by their necks between his fingers, waving them and declaring it was happy hour and Fitz's attendance was required.

***

If asked, Fitz would admit he'd had perhaps a pint too many, but he'd also be more than willing to blame that on Hunter's powers of persuasion paired with a desperate need to slow his mind down. He'd tried to get to a place where his motor function wasn't too impaired but the thoughts spinning in his head would quiet down, at least for awhile.

He'd missed the mark, badly, and gotten just the opposite. His mind was still too clear but his body was not completely cooperating. He also remembered being rather free with his words, egged on by Hunter (mostly) and Mack (a little), and he was feeling just as confused and upset as he had earlier as a result. If he'd spent the time venting about his uneasiness at having Simmons around again, he might have actually felt better. As it was, he'd ended up spending as much or more time defending her and repeating how much he hoped she was happy in her new life now that she'd left S.H.I.E.L.D., and that had done absolutely nothing to raise his spirits.

When he got to his quarters, his hands fumbled with the door handle for a minute, but it finally gave and turned freely to let him in. He fell backward onto his bed after kicking the door shut behind him, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyelids. He kind of wished the room would spin so he could be distracted by queasiness, but other than the trouble he was having controlling his hands (something that never happened to him while drinking before the hypoxia, he noted with a little bitterness) and a desire to find Simmons and say a few things to her (lowered inhibitions that come from too much alcohol ingestion, his brain told him in Simmons's voice) the 'drink a few beers' experiment for this evening had not yielded the hoped-for results at all.

He had just begun to wonder if he was going to find the strength within to get up and at least take some of his clothes off before falling asleep when there was a very hesitant knock on his door. It was so quiet, in fact, that he believed he'd imagined it until it was followed by another, louder series of knocks.

"I haven't locked it, Hunter. You can come in, but if you've brought me another beer it was a wasted trip. I told you I was done—"

"It's not Hunter," came Jemma's hesitant voice from the doorway. His upper body rocketed off the mattress and he sat up to look at her, suddenly glad that he hadn't started stripping off his clothes when he came in. If she'd come to catch up, the only thing that could make what was sure to be a humiliating conversation hearing about Jemma's new life with Will worse would be if he was wearing boxer shorts and a t-shirt while he had to pretend his happiness for her wasn't at least a little conflicted with disappointment for himself.

"Hello," he said, weakly, and he wondered exactly how similar to a brewery he smelled and how embarrassed he should be about that.

"I'm sorry, it seems you were expecting Hunter to come by and you might not have told me to come in if you'd known—"

"It's fine," he said, interrupting her flustered apology. "I would have told you to come in as well." Even as he was saying it, he wasn't sure whether it was a white lie or the truth.

"It's just—we didn't get much of a chance to talk earlier. You seemed quite busy. Did you finish the project you were working on?" She looked a little more confident now that she'd shifted the subject to work, and he was grateful for the safer topic as well. The comfort of this temporary safe harbor gave him the courage to get up and shut the door quietly behind her so they could keep whatever they were about to discuss private.

"No, I hit a roadblock. I'll start over from scratch tomorrow, but at least I know—"

"—what doesn't work," she finished for him, repeating something they'd told each other so many times and on so many projects and Fitz was hit with a wave of nostalgia so strong he had to look down and swallow through it until it passed.

"Right, yeah. Tomorrow I'll start fresh."

Jemma looked at him for a long moment, giving him her 'holding my breath while I consider this and I may never breathe again unless the answer comes to me' look, and if he could have thought of some way to excuse himself from his own quarters, he probably would have done it.

"We haven't been talking much."

"I didn't want to compromise your new identity," he replied automatically, giving her the excuse he gave himself whenever he noticed how long it had been since they'd been in contact.

"I was told that using the secured, anonymized email addresses was safe. Is that wrong?"

"No, it's as safe as anything could be. I just—"

"I know things have been difficult," she said, the words tumbling out quickly as though she was trying to say them before she lost her nerve. "When we do communicate, I've been getting the impression that you don't have all the information you could have, and I haven't been sure how to address it without it sounding...odd." 

She winced, and he could tell she was having trouble finding the right words to get across what she meant. That was a feeling he could understand better than most. A wave of sympathy for her crashed over him and he set his desire to protect himself aside in favor of trying to make this easier on her.

"Whatever it is, Simmons, just say it. You can say anything to me, always could, no matter what." He felt suddenly sure she was trying to find a way to tell him that Will had proposed to her. She was getting married and that would be a barrier even more insurmountable than the one the portal had created between them. "Even if you think it'll hurt me, just say it. I'm stronger than I look."

"You look _quite_ strong, actually, Fitz. You're not the wiry engineer who left the Academy with me, not anymore." She ran a hand tentatively over his forearm, as though she couldn't quite trust her eyes to catalog the changes he'd gone through in the last few years.

Her touch made him aware of how closely they were standing and it was a disorienting sensation. For so long, the concept of personal space had been completely irrelevant in their relationship. They'd thought nothing of standing hip-to-hip at a lab table, reaching over each other for supplies or instruments without bothering with a 'pardon me' or 'can I help you reach that'. 

That comfort was broken, though, once so many of their problems could be measured in the space between them, whether enforced by themselves or by some outer force bent on keeping them apart. Having her back within reach was almost more than he could bear, harder even than anticipating whatever news she'd felt compelled to come to his quarters to tell him. When he continued to stare at the hand she'd brushed against his sleeve, his notice apparently made her uncomfortable enough to snatch her hand back.

The movement broke him out of his thoughts. "Just say it," he whispered, wishing this was already over and at least the uncertainty making this moment profoundly unsettling would be behind him.

"Will and I aren't," she began, the words rushing out so quickly she didn't seem able to continue without rethinking things, "we aren't...he and I didn't...we aren't together in any sense of the word."

Fitz blinked, trying to get the information to make sense, but it just didn't line up. She left to start a new life with Will, the one person Fitz had trusted to make her happy, and they weren't together?

"What are you talking about, Simmons? Being with Will, that's the reason you left S.H.I.E.L.D.! What happened?"

"He's...he's not the reason I left S.H.I.E.L.D.. Will and I both knew before I left that things weren't going to work out. I knew before that, really."

The room really was spinning now, with Simmons and these unbelievable things she was saying able to succeed where the beer had failed.

"We shouldn't talk about this, at least not right now. I've had a bit to drink—"

"Fitz," she began, sounding sceptical. "I've heard you recite the Callan-Symanzik equation and the equation from the Standard Model theory after drinking a half-dozen shots, you know. Are you saying a few pints have put you into a state where we can't have a simple conversation?" 

He smiled ruefully. He should have known she knew him too well for that excuse to go anywhere. 

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have blamed it on the alcohol. I'm tired after a long day and I'm not feeling myself. You've had a difficult day as well." He pleaded silently with his eyes for her to agree. "I think I need a little time, and I think you could do with some too."

He could see her wavering. His request was reasonable, but it must have taken quite a lot of courage for her to come to him tonight and she must be afraid they'd never sort anything out if she gave in now. He wanted to give her something, some hint that he wasn't just stalling long enough to find a way to shut her out.

"Were you serious, earlier? When you said you wanted to take a look at what I was working on?"

She tilted her head and blinked a few times, as though she was resetting herself. "Yes, of course I was. I can't imagine what I'll do locked up in here unless I find something to do in the lab. I don't know if Director Coulson will clear it, as I've formally left S.H.I.E.L.D.—"

"I don't think that will be a problem. I'll talk to him in the morning."

"I think...it would be lovely to work together again. You really don't think he'll mind?"

"Give me a little time to take care of that and then stop by the lab tomorrow...maybe around ten?"

"That sounds fine," she said, sounding disturbingly businesslike, but her expression soon softened. "I really do think we should talk, though. Not now, but soon."

"Of course," he said, not feeling nearly as sure as he sounded. "Why don't we get dinner tomorrow?" As soon as the words left his mouth, he thought back to their aborted date after her return through the portal and immediately regretted the suggestion. Surely it would remind her of darker times and her difficult transition back to life on Earth.

"I was hoping to be able to talk more privately. I don't think it's a conversation for a common area somewhere."

He was trying to imagine what she planned to say, how upset she imagined he would be that they couldn't be around anyone else when she told him. 

"Dinner still sounds lovely," she continued. "I was just hoping we could eat in my quarters, or yours, if you'd like. Just so we could talk with some privacy."

"Sure," he agreed. 

"Thank you, Fitz. That's excellent." She gave him a long, hard look, like she was searching his face for some sort of clue, but she didn't seem to find it. "I think this will be good, I really do."

She patted him a couple of times, haltingly, on the shoulder, and he walked her back toward the door to his quarters. A moment later, she was gone and Fitz was alone with his thoughts once again.

He went over every word of their conversation, lying back on his bed with his arms pillowed beneath this head. Perhaps she was planning to tell him at last, plainly and directly, that she had moved on entirely. She may have had feelings for him before, but after some time apart, she had decided she wasn't interested in being anything other than his friend. 

It was many hours of thoughtful ceiling studying before he fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming about air bubbles behind a porthole window and dust storms on blue planets.


	3. Working Together

Fitz caught himself humming—actually _humming_ —some tuneless song as he tried to stop himself from glancing at the time on his workstation yet again. Even with the uncertainty of what Simmons wanted to discuss with him, he found he was looking forward to the possibility of collaborating with her professionally again.

He'd already been to see Coulson that morning (Fitz stuck his head in the man's office at 6:45 am to find him sitting there as though he'd been awake for hours) and the restrained glee Fitz had received from the Director at the idea of Jemma working for S.H.I.E.L.D. again even temporarily had secured her clearance to be briefed about his ongoing projects. Now all he needed was for time to move forward.

He threw himself into working with the torn-apart tracker, considering each piece laid out before him. He considered different sorts of changes, starting with new ways for the tracker to lock onto its subject, in an effort to further reduce the gadget's size. It was still too large and too likely to be found and disposed of to be useful in the field, no matter what he tried. Perhaps a trip back to the drawing board would be necessary, but he didn't relish the idea of having to start over from scratch.

"Good morning," came Jemma's voice from behind him, and he flicked a surprised eye to the clock to find that the hours had indeed passed. It was ten o'clock exactly and she was just as disturbingly punctual as she'd always been.

"Morning," he replied, then found himself at a loss for what to say next.

Jemma was looking around the lab and he could see her taking in the many changes that had occurred in the past year. About six months ago, he'd finally dismantled her workstation and redistributed the parts in different areas of the room. It had taken on an unchanging, museum exhibit quality in her absence that was a painful daily reminder of their estrangement. It had felt like the right thing to do at the time, but watching her run her hand slowly over the table where her station had once been made his stomach lurch with regret.

"Everything's still here, if there's something you need. We can move everything back—"

She looked up at him suddenly and smiled, though there was a sadness behind it. "I'm sure we could, if we needed to. Let's just get started, and if we need to rearrange anything, we'll deal with it then."

"Absolutely," he agreed, and they fell into a somewhat strained silence.

"Perhaps you could show me what you're working on?" she suggested.

"Yeah," Fitz breathed, relieved to be able to shift the conversation to something more practical. He handed her a schematic of the last construction of the device and she looked it over, frowning as she took in the details. "It needs to be smaller," he explained. "Smaller, undetectable, and as easy to deploy as possible."

"Fitz, you're not going to believe this." She looked up from the tablet, grinning at him. "I've been working on something, bit of a side project to keep me entertained in my spare time. I think it's just what you need to complete this project."

"What will you need to recreate the work you had to leave behind when you were evacuated?"

Her smile got wider as she reached into her pocket and pulled out a thumb drive. "I can do better than that. I brought everything with me. I had enough time to transfer the files before I had to wipe the drives in my apartment." 

She held the drive out to him, but he gestured toward his workstation and stepped back, inviting her to take over and show him what she had.

***

"This comms system is fascinating," she said, watching the readout of data being transmitted from the tracker to one of the computers in the lab. The encryption algorithm, it's entirely new, isn't it? Even if the data is intercepted, you've made it look like background electromagnetic radiation coming from a _natural_ source! Just amazing."

Fitz had three tablets and a monitor in front of him, cross-checking the data against expected results. "What about this biological camouflage concept of yours? You've made the tracker _ingestible_!"

"Or injectable," she added. "Depending on the access to the subject you're trying to surveil, one method may be easier to achieve than the other."

"Invisible on any scan _including_ an MRI. Brilliant."

"We'll still need to be within approximately one mile to receive a clear return signal," she added, frowning. "Using the human body as a conductor has a few advantages, but one huge drawback. The electrical resistance of the human body can vary rather widely between 300 and 1,000 ohms, so it's difficult to calibrate any sort of countermeasure to the effect it has on signal strength. I'd like to look into it a little more, see if there's a way increase that one mile range."

"I think we can do it. We can adjust the signal and do a few tests, that'll give us a better idea what sorts of changes we should look into." 

"Do you think Bobbi and Mack would consent to acting as test subjects? They would represent something close to the low and high points of the human body resistance range respectively. Of course, we can't be sure of the effects of inhuman biology on the expected range, but perhaps Daisy would allow me to take a few scans."

"We'll need to talk to Coulson before we start using anyone other than the literal lab rats, Simmons."

"Oh, of course. Do you think he could see us now?" Jemma started gathering up her notes, her fingers flying over the screen of a tablet as she began to organize their findings.

His eyes flew to the clock and he was surprised at how late it had gotten while they were busy working. He smirked a little, oddly pleased at how quickly the time had passed once they became engrossed in a project together. "Did you happen to see the time?"

She stopped and glanced over her shoulder at the clock on the monitor behind her, then shook her head a little in surprise. "It's 6:45. How did it get so late?"

"I suppose we got on a roll and just didn't notice," he offered. 

"Wouldn't be the first time," she said, her voice quieter now.

"We could keep working, if you like. We don't have to—"

"No," she replied, the word coming quickly to stop his suggestion. "No, I think we should have dinner. Unless you think it's vital that we get a prototype working tonight."

He paused for a moment. He could lie and insist that the timetable was more important than it truly was and it would buy him some time. Working together had gone amazingly well and he was sure the spell would be broken by whatever conversation they were due to have that evening. Part of him wanted so much to have a few more hours in the lab with her before things were strained between them again. They weren't just finishing each other's sentences, they were finishing each other's thoughts with a complex intricacy he'd almost forgotten they were capable of.

"I think we'll make better progress tomorrow," he said, realizing how cowardly hiding in the lab would be. "I'll head out to get the food, if you wouldn't mind finishing the clearing up here."

"Should I meet you at your quarters?"

"I know it's getting late, but could you give me about an hour?" He winced, realizing they'd forgotten completely about lunch and she had to be quite hungry by now.

"No, that's fine. I'd like to review a few of these notes we made before I clear my head for the night. I'll be at your quarters in an hour."

***

After a whirlwind trip out and a few frustrating moments maneuvering his desk to make a workable place for them to eat, Fitz was pacing back and forth in the tiny interior of his quarters. He was already feeling a little claustrophobic and Simmons wasn't even here yet.

He spun around until he faced the clock, staring at it and wondering if he was willing it to move faster or slower. He still wasn't sure when he heard the knock at his door, but prepared or not, he was out of time.

Once he fumbled the door open, he took in a back-lit Jemma Simmons waiting for him in the hallway. The light haloed around her strangely too-dark hair and cast her face into just enough shadow that her expression was difficult to see. She'd changed her clothes from the practical outfit she'd worn in the lab into a dress that somehow felt scandalous for its very existence despite being somewhat conservative.

He stood there gaping at her, feeling inadequate for having merely changed his shirt almost as an afterthought after he'd rearranged the furniture.

"Good evening, Fitz," she said, and her tone was gently leading as though she was waiting for him to do something. 

Surely he should be doing something, but he found himself incapable of coming up with any ideas.

"Fitz?" she prompted again, suddenly looking hesitant. "Did you want to invite me in?"

"Yeah," he said, snapping back to his senses. "Sorry, yeah. Please come in." He opened the door more widely and moved to the side to give her plenty of room to walk past him.

"It occurs to me that an hour wasn't an especially long time for you to do everything you needed to do. Are you sure I wasn't too early?"

"No, you're fine," he said, feeling crazily like she might turn around and leave if she thought she was inconveniencing him somehow. "I was just finishing up." He looked down, realizing again that he was underdressed. "I was thinking about changing my clothes, I may just pop into the—"

"Oh, don't do that. You're fine just as you are." She looked down and pulled at her skirt a little as though she was suddenly feeling uncomfortable in it. 

"Why don't you have a seat," he said, pulling out a chair and deliberately changing the subject, "and I'll get the food. Would you like something to drink?"

"That would be lovely, as we somehow managed to forget about lunch earlier today." Her small smile seemed more genuine and relaxed now. "And water, please. Thank you."

They began to eat and talked over a few theories they'd both come up with in the past hour since they'd left the lab, falling comfortably into a rhythm that they'd spent a decade perfecting. They both knew there was harder ground ahead to cover but they seemed to have come to an understanding to avoid that territory while they were eating.

When he was done eating, he looked up and saw Jemma was watching him, having finished several minutes before.

"I'm sorry to keep you waiting, but you know how I hate leftovers."

"How would you know, Fitz? I don't think you've ever had any."

He pushed his plate away, wondering how all of this could seem so normal. "This has been a good day," he noted, finding that he wasn't that surprised they were still capable of working so well together.

Jemma exploded with barely-restrained excitement across the table from him. "It was, wasn't it? I haven't felt like that in a long time. My work now is all so theoretical and I hardly interact with anyone else. When I do, it seems like they take forever to understand what I'm trying to say."

"I know what you mean! I've got lab assistants here but it just seems like they get in the way on the bigger tasks."

"What happened to us, Fitz?" she whispered, casting her eyes down to her lap.

He swallowed, hard, and took a moment before answering. She was asking the question he'd asked himself more times than he could count. "Things got complicated. We both did what we had to do, working together to get the portal open again, and it was the right thing to do. Wasn't exactly easy on either of us."

She nodded. "You were the only one who could help me and I knew I couldn't do it without you. What I asked you to do...it hurt you, Fitz. It killed me to do it and I was honestly trying to avoid it, but I had no choice."

"It was a year ago," he said, trying to downplay how much thinking back to those months still stung, but he reminded himself they wouldn't get anywhere this evening by glossing over the truth. "All right, I was disappointed. I won't try to deny that, but I know it wasn't your fault. I was still thankful to have you back, even if it meant I had to accept that things had changed."

"That's just it, though, Fitz. We weren't communicating very well, especially right before we were able to re-open the portal. It was an absolutely terrible time for me, and when you kept saying you just wanted to focus on the portal whenever I tried to work up the courage to talk to you, I took the easy way out and agreed. There are things I should have told you, conversations we should have had, but I wasn't able to do it then."

"I wanted to make things easier on you. I didn't want to put any pressure on you when things were already so complicated."

"It's a year later, and so many things are settled now that weren't then." She paused, looking uncertain for a moment, but after a deep breath, she seemed to make a decision to press on. "I miss you terribly, Fitz. I'd like to tell you what happened and see where that leaves us."


	4. The Talk

Fitz gulped, finding himself as unprepared to face this as he'd ever felt in his life. "I know what you're going to say and I promise you, it's unnecessary. You don't have to worry about me if you're thinking about coming back to S.H.I.E.L.D. I think we proved today we can still work together."

"Fitz, you always did jump to conclusions without all the data. For a scientist, you're a bit impetuous." Her tone was teasing, and it felt so normal and comfortable that he just basked in it rather than give her the indignant denial she'd probably been expecting. "I'd like to tell you some things, things we should have talked about a year ago."

He nodded, bracing himself for whatever she needed him to know. 

"I told you last night that Will and I aren't together," she began, standing up and pacing slowly across the room as she spoke. "After he got through decontamination last year and he was cleared to leave, I helped him contact his family and that's where he went." 

"I was there, Simmons, I know all this." He winced. That came out wrong. He'd been trying to spare her rehashing what he already knew but at the pained look in her eyes when he interrupted her, he realized he sounded more impatient than anything else.

"You _don't_ know all this, and I need to start from the beginning. Please." 

"I'm sorry. Please go ahead."

"Will and I halfheartedly talked about me coming to visit, but we both knew there was no reason to book the plane ticket. There's nothing between us on this planet. For a long time, there wasn't anything between us on the other one, either, not until I thought my last chance of getting home was gone. Desperation, hopelessness, and loneliness isn't a basis for a life with someone unless it's all you have. I care about him and I couldn't be more happy that we—you and I—were able to make his rescue possible, but that's all it ever was."

This information should have made him happy, but it was so different from what he'd thought that he couldn't fathom it. He'd stepped aside once Will's rescue was complete and Simmons hadn't stopped him. He'd taken that as her way of gently letting him know that her feelings for Will were something she needed to pursue. 

"When I first got back, I wanted to be relieved you'd done the impossible and rescued me, but things were so confusing that I was only able to think from moment to moment. I had to focus on one thing at a time, because whenever I let myself think it just reminded me how I gave up on you when you never gave up on me."

"Simmons, you had to use cobbled together, mostly decades-old technology and you were regularly distracted with the business of surviving on a planet where you were never meant to be. I'd call it a miracle you were able to calculate even one portal opening except that you're so bloody brilliant." 

"It's just...I had felt so optimistic right before I got pulled through the portal. Everyone close to us had pulled through after that standoff with the Inhumans, the immediate threats had been dealt with, and it felt like something really…" she looked at him, tears threatening at the corners of her eyes as she tried to continue, "...good was about to happen."

She was now unable to fight against the tears and they rolled down her face as she blinked them away. Despite every self-preservation instinct he had screaming at him not to move, he got up and pulled her into his arms. Her head settled between his chin and his shoulder and she clung to him, her hands fisted in his shirt.

"If you felt, I don't know...guilty, you shouldn't. You didn't owe me anything."

She stiffened in his arms and took a sharp breath, her hands releasing his shirt. She pulled away a little and peered into his face with an utterly unreadable expression.

"You don't think I owe you anything? Do you really think that? You've saved my life more times than I can count. You pulled me back through the portal when everyone else had given up...including me."

He shook his head, wondering if he should take this conversation in the direction he'd intended a moment ago. She seemed to be deliberately avoiding a discussion about the nature of their relationship. To be fair, he wasn't sure he could take having this conversation one more time either.

"That's not exactly what I meant, but I'm not sure it's necessary for us to talk about this. At least, maybe not right now while we've got Ward to worry about."

"When do you _think_ we should talk about this? After a few weeks of awkwardly avoiding the subject? That's always worked out so well for us in the past." She had that crinkle in her forehead just between her eyebrows, the one she'd always gotten whenever she felt the need to explain exactly how wrong he was about something.

He sighed and pulled away from her, running his hands through his hair. If they were going to do this, he certainly couldn't be holding her while she struggled to find a way to tell him she no longer had romantic feelings for him, if she ever really had in the first place.

"I wasn't talking about owing me for, I don't know, doing what I could to keep you safe whenever I could. We've both been in danger and we've each helped the other when we were. I was never keeping score and I hope you weren't either." 

She nodded and took a step back, looking down at the floor between their feet. He hated how upset she looked. He'd worked so hard a year ago to help ensure her happiness, but he could see now that hadn't been the outcome at all.

"What I said to you at the bottom of the ocean," he began, then had to take a deep breath to steel himself. They'd danced around their feelings with vague language and hesitancy for so long and it had caused nothing but grief and misunderstandings. He exhaled, closing his eyes, and then began again. "I know I was a bit vague, but I was sure you knew what I meant. I was in love with you, Jemma. It's just, after I was on the mend, neither of us followed up on it."

"It didn't seem like the right time. It was one of the reasons I was so desperate for you to recover and pressured you too much. I didn't handle that well," she admitted, whispering as though this was one of her deepest, darkest secrets.

"Neither of us handled that well. I don't blame you for taking the undercover assignment." She gave him a rather incredulous look. "Okay, at the time, I blamed you for leaving. Now I can see why you did. We needed some distance, and I needed some space to suss out what normal was after the hypoxia."

"Everything I did seemed to make you worse."

"I'm not sure anything was going to help me, other than time. I'm serious, though, Simmons. I don't blame you for leaving. I think we needed it."

She nodded, though she still looked a little hesitant. "I...I wondered sometimes if you were angry that I pulled you to the surface with me that day, especially when you were really struggling. I didn't know what to say. You had been willing to sacrifice yourself to save me, but when it was my turn to help you, I wasn't able to get you to the surface quickly enough."

"Jemma, it was a miracle you were able to get me there at all. With how far the pod had sunk I was worried about you making it there on your own, never mind dragging all my dead weight with you."

"Don't say that," she said, quickly. "Don't say 'dead weight'."

"All right," he agreed, regretting his choice of words. "I know I seemed angry with you, and I gave you plenty of reason to believe it. It wasn't you, though. I was just angry, at everything. I can't blame you for not wanting to think about what I'd told you when I tried to tell you how I felt that day."

"I did think about it. Not just then, but ever since then. You heard those recordings I made on the planet. I was daydreaming about all the time we've spent together, about our date, about starting a new life with you."

"I'm not holding you to anything you said or felt before the portal. I would never do that. That's what I meant when I told you that you didn't owe me anything. You made no promises and a lot has happened since then."

"Fitz, you listened to those recordings. Thinking of you, talking to you, that kept me going for months. I planned our first date in my head a thousand times, wondering if it would feel different between us or the same, just...more."

"But none of that was a promise to me. Some bloody crazy things intervened and everything changed. You did a reasonable thing, Simmons. You found a reason to go on."

"Weren't you just the tiniest bit upset?" she asked, and the uncertainty of her voice told him there was something else behind the question, something he wasn't seeing.

"Of course I was. Everyone thought I was stark raving mad, not giving up on getting you back."

"No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about when I was such a mess after you rescued me, and then when I told you about Will. You didn't seem…" she trailed off, looking at him apprehensively. "You didn't seem that disappointed. You jumped right into helping me rescue this man I'd been so close to, like you...almost like you were relieved. Then when we found him, all you seemed to do was push me toward him while you got as far from me as possible."

"Relieved...no." He almost laughed at how patently ridiculous the idea was to him, but Simmons seemed to believe in it quite strongly. "I didn't want you to see how...well...broken-hearted I was. You had been through so much, how could I ask you to worry about me? We didn't agree to anything other than dinner, and based on that, I was going to make you feel awful about choices you made when you thought you'd never see any of us again? It was no one's fault, it was just bad timing."

"Even if you say it wasn't my fault, it kills me that I hurt you."

"You agreed to one date, that was all. It hardly seems like a reasonable basis to worry about me feeling slighted when you were still having such trouble being home."

"Reasonable basis...I didn't need a date to help me work out how I feel about you. The real mystery is how I could _ever_ have missed that I was in love with you," she whispered, cupping his cheek in her outstretched hand. "That I'm still in love with you. Anyone else would have resented me for what I'd done, and there you were, still trying to make me happy."

"Simmons, please don't say—"

"When did I start being Simmons again? I liked when you started calling me Jemma."

He huffed out a breath, irrationally frustrated that she was derailing him when he was trying to convince himself she had really just said she loved him.

"Jemma," he began, pointedly using her first name. "Are you saying that you thought my feelings for you might have changed after I found out about you and Will on the other planet?" She nodded, looking uncertain about where he was going with this. "And I didn't want you to feel obligated to continue what you might have felt for me before, especially if your feelings had changed because of what you and Will lived through together while you were both trapped there."

"Which couldn't have been more wrong," she said, quickly. 

"Why didn't we just...talk?" he said, asking himself as much as he was asking her. 

"I was afraid," she admitted. "Maybe we both were? Perhaps I still am." She looked thoughtful for a moment. "But why are we afraid at all? The worst has happened, we barely talk to each other. There's nothing to lose anymore, there's no going back."

"I don't know," he began, leaning into her hand and looking deeply into her eyes. His heart was racing and he could feel his hands shaking, something that only happened now when he was tired or anxious. "I don't know, but I'm bloody terrified."

"Me too," Simmons confessed, but she took a half step toward him, just enough for their bodies to brush lightly against each other. 

Fitz cleared his throat, the merest hint of her against him short-circuiting any rational thought he was still capable of. "Jemma, is it all right if I—"

"Oh, bloody hell, Fitz. Please kiss me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, the timing of the chapter break... I'm so sorry. To apologize for leaving off there, I will be posting chapter five as soon as I finish a couple of last minute edits, which will be a matter of hours, not days.


	5. Reconciliation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you, for any reason, wanted to skip the 'E' content, you can safely avoid this chapter and miss very little plot. (None that won't be rehashed coming up.)

The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes were her eyelids fluttering closed as well. Then their lips brushed against each other with just the barest of pressure before they both retreated. When the world didn't end around them, he moved his hands to the back of her head as their lips met again. This time they were both more insistent and he deepened the kiss when Simmons let her mouth fall open a little.

Fitz teased his tongue past her lips and she moaned against him, letting her hands brush down his chest to grab his shirt and pull him flush against her. He could drink her in for a lifetime and he'd never get tired of it. 

She broke the kiss and he had to swallow down what would have been a particularly pathetic-sounding whimper at the loss of contact. Their eyes locked, both of them breathing hard. His mind was alive with impulses to pull her closer or even to move them to his bed, but everything had happened so fast he wasn't sure how comfortable she'd be with any of that. 

In the midst of that whirl of thoughts, he realized something very important. He pulled back, leaving her at arm's length and holding her by the shoulders.

"Simmons...Jemma. I didn't—you said, before—"

"What?" she said, laughing lightly as she brushed a hand through his too-short hair. 

"I still love you. I love you too."

She kissed him, then let her mouth trail across his cheek to the hollow just beneath his earlobe. "Show me," she whispered, and the light breath of air across his neck as she spoke made him shiver.

He struggled with his instinct to be protective of her, even if it was himself he was protecting her from. He wanted so much from her, to touch her and learn those few things about her that he didn't already know. He could discover what made her moan his name, find new expressions on her achingly familiar features, learn her body as well as he knew her mind. He wanted it all so much that he didn't know if she would find it too overwhelming.

Her hands skimmed upward from where they'd been resting lightly on his waist, pushing insistently under his shirt. The warmth of her hands on his abdomen forced a sharp breath into his lungs. She had deliberately crossed a line and he was reminded of the way she would sometimes ask him an intentionally provocative question in the lab to send his thoughts on a new tangent. They'd made some of their best breakthroughs after the heated debates that ensued from that little trick of hers and he smiled against the soft skin of her neck that he'd been memorizing with his lips.

"Jemma," he growled against her.

"Yes, Fitz?" she returned, her voice full of innocence while her hands slipped to his back, where her fingers traced the lines of his shoulders. The movement pulled his shirt up and the cool air against his now fiery skin made him feel feverish and almost unhinged.

She slid her hands down his sides slowly, then back up, over and over as their mouths moved together again, testing each other with deep, searching kisses. On one upward movement, she caught the bulk of his shirt and pulled upward, fighting him a little when he failed to yield. 

At her noise of frustration, he impatiently pulled back to let her yank it over his head, then closed his mouth around her earlobe and worried it between his lips. When that made her gasp and clutch at his head with both hands, he switched to his teeth. He didn't close down hard, just ran them along the skin in achingly slow, gentle nibbles. That earned him a breathy, drawn out whisper of his name and her low-pitched, almost pained voice made him pull her so close to him that he could swear he felt her heart beating against his chest. He needed her—he always had—but now it sped through his veins and filled his lungs and traveled in every minute electrical impulse crackling from one nerve to another.

Jemma took one step backward and he realized she was leading them to his bed. He pulled back and found her heavy-lidded eyes with his, searching relentlessly to make sure she really wanted this. If they took this step and she came to regret it later he believed it might actually kill him.

"Are you sure you want—"

She stopped him with her fingertips against his lips and he kissed them, her eyes flying shut for a moment before she looked at him again.

"I have never wanted anything else before in my life as much as I want this, right now." Her eyes were dark as she spoke, the tone of her voice removing any doubts he had remaining.

She pulled her hand away from his mouth and her arms lifted, meeting behind her at her neck. She shifted her right arm downward and the bodice of her dress began to loosen, pulling away from her enough to reveal an expanse of skin on one creamy shoulder. When the zipper was opened to her waist she took the dress by the neckline and let it fall to the floor, pooling around her feet.

His eyes drank her in, all of her revealed to him except what was still hidden behind delicate peach-colored lace. There was a faint blush on her cheeks and her breathing was more erratic. He wondered at it until it finally occurred to him that she was self-conscious. He couldn't fathom why she would be as he studied her, currently transfixed by the way her hips sloped gently away from her waist. Everywhere he looked, it was more of her that he could fit into the puzzle that was her, this complex, brilliant woman in front of him that he loved beyond all reason.

"Jem...my God. You're…" he trailed off, lacking the ability to describe her in mere words. 

"Almost naked," she finished for him, her nerves coming through in the slight strain of her voice.

He let the back of his hand slip, feather-light, over the line of her jaw. He kept moving, catching the curve of her shoulder, skimming over the side of her breast before he turned his hand over to let his palm rest gently on her waist.

"Perfect," he corrected. He didn't want to tear his eyes off of her, but she was altogether too far away from him and he couldn't keep studying her and pull her close at the same time. The feel of her skin against his hand was too much, though, and that decided him. He stepped closer to her, winding his arms around her back as he found her mouth in another kiss. When more of their bare skin came into contact, they both moaned.

"More, Fitz," she whispered. He wasn't sure what she meant, but when her arms snaked behind her back again to pull at the clasp, he felt her bra loosen and then fall between them.

Though they were closed, his eyes rolled back when there were no more barriers between their upper bodies and he could feel her trembling against him with every breath they took. She shifted again, pushing down her remaining scrap of clothing until it was also gone.

She took another step backward, pulling him with her, but he turned them until his back was to the bed instead. When he felt his legs brush against the edge of his bed, he sat backward, pulling her with him as he encircled her waist in his arms. As she followed, she let her knees fall on either side of his legs, sitting snugly on his lap. He captured her mouth with his as she let her weight pull her down against him, smiling into the kiss when he groaned at this new sublime torture.

"I want you so much," he spoke into her skin as she threw her head back, his lips moving to her neck. He bent his head further and captured one pebbled, rosy nipple in his mouth, teasing it with his tongue. 

"Fitz," she moaned, and he loved the sound of his name on her lips and the way he heard everything he was feeling echoed back to him in her voice. She repeated it in a litany as he teased at her skin with his tongue, every syllable driving him further from sanity.

When she pulled back he tried to follow, but she'd already moved off his lap to his right, settling into his pillows. Her hair splayed in wild curls around her head and her chest was heaving with deep, open-mouthed breaths. It was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

He'd begun to move toward her when her hand fell on the front of his trousers, fingers toying with the button at his waist. He replaced her hands with his, slipping the button through the hole as she pulled down the zipper. They both pulled downward on the loosened fabric and Fitz hooked his thumbs under his boxers as well, baring himself to her the way she had already done for him.

She reached down and her fingers brushed against him, then her hand opened and she closed her palm around his length. He hissed sharply between his teeth, fighting for control when every molecule in his body was screaming out to bury himself inside her. He felt pulled into her, driven toward her by a force beyond his understanding.

He shifted, bracing his weight on one arm to the side of her. He cupped her breast in his hand, squeezing lightly when she pushed up into him seeking more pressure. He moved downward, letting his index finger trace a line past her waist and then brushing over the curve of her hip. 

She trembled as he urged her to part her legs and allow him to explore her further, so he stopped and found her eyes. He didn't move, frozen lightly in place until she looked at him, smiling a little when she realized he was making sure she wasn't hesitating.

"Yes, Fitz. Please," she told him, letting her head fall back. Her chin raised as she arched into his touch, exposing the long, graceful line of her neck to him again. As his finger teased inside her he bent forward, placing long, open-mouthed kisses in the valley between her neck and shoulder. He moved deeper inside her as her hands splayed on his back, then pulled away again, studying her reactions to find the rhythm she needed from him.

As her breathing quickened and her nails scraped lightly against his skin, he searched out with his thumb, finding what he was looking for just above the finger that was moving inside her and she gasped against him. 

"You're amazing. I love you so much," he whispered, narrowing his focus to the movement of his hand and the feel of her beneath him. He tried to read her body, continuing anything that seemed to work for her.

She repeated his name again and again, each time making the single syllable sound different somehow. He continued, ignoring the roaring in his ears as she began to move against him with shallow undulations of her hips that nearly undid him. He held on only because he needed to do this for her and to watch her as she came apart against him.

He felt the moment she fell over the top, her body contracting around his finger as she pressed upward into his hand. Her eyes flew open and he watched each wave of emotion that passed over her face. He'd never felt so close to another person, drinking in the intimacy of this moment as she fought to stay open to him and resist closing her eyes.

When she relaxed, he pulled gently away, leaning back and dropping his head close to hers on the pillow. Several long minutes passed before either of them even moved.

"Fitz, that was…"

"Is there a word for what that was? Because if there is, I don't know it." 

She turned toward him, a sly smile on her lips. "Yes, it was whatever that word is for me, as well." Her hand snuck between them and he yelped when she made contact with his hard length.

"Please...don't. I mean, I wish you could, but don't." 

Humor danced in her eyes and she pulled back. She shifted back on her elbows, which caused her back to arch and her breasts to jut forward. He stared at her, open mouthed, until she pulled at his arm.

"Come here, Fitz," she whispered.

He began to shift his weight over her when the last coherent thought he was capable of dashed through his brain, causing his head to fall back and a groan to escape his lips.

At her questioning glance, he explained, "I don't have...anything. I didn't think...I don't have any reason to—"

She sat forward, her lips brushing against his ear. "In my bag. It's by the door." She pulled away, a sheepish look on her face. "I don't want you to think I assumed—"

"I don't care if you did assume, you're absolutely brilliant." He got up to retrieve her bag from the table by the door, holding it out to her as he walked back. 

She was smirking at him. "Could you take one more lap, please?" she asked, innocently.

"You're mad," he said, watching as she dug into a cardboard box inside her bag and came out with a square, foil package. He held his hand out but she pulled the condom back, intent on keeping it for herself.

He settled in next to her, propping himself up on an arm to watch her as she opened the packet and rolled the condom slowly over him. He struggled just a bit to maintain self-restraint at the torturous feel of her hand, but he'd be damned if he was going to deny them anything they could experience together tonight by losing control of himself.

She raised an eyebrow at him when she was done, a little of the lighthearted mood that had passed between them moments ago still remaining, but the gravity of the step they were about to take together was clearly on both of their minds.

She reached out for him and he settled between her legs, brushing her hair back from her face as he tried to hold most of his weight off of her.

"I love you, Fitz," she said, blinking up at him. 

"Love you so much, Jemma," he returned, slipping inside her as she moved beneath him to help guide him there. He pushed forward slowly to allow her to adjust as he felt her warmth envelop him.

When he was buried completely inside her, he stopped, letting his head fall forward until their foreheads touched. Her hand caught his cheek and he kissed her. He began to move, pulling almost all the way out before pushing forward again. He gritted his teeth with the effort of forcing himself to move slowly, keeping the same deliberate rhythm each time. She met every slow thrust, gasping at the pleasure the pressure gave her each time he was buried completely inside her.

She arched her back and he dipped his head down, pulling a nipple into his mouth as he continued the same pace. Her nails scratched at his back and she pulled at his shoulders, silently urging him to accelerate his movements.

He refused to move faster but began to drive home harder, putting more pressure into the twist of his hips at the end of each thrust. He could hear nothing but white noise rushing through his ears and the intoxicating noises coming from her as they moved against each other. He dropped his head to the mattress over her shoulder, struggling to maintain control and resist the urge to pound mindlessly against her until oblivion came.

Her mouth found his ear and she bit down hard, almost painfully, on his earlobe. His hands fisted in the sheets below them as he fought his reaction, but he was lost when she began to whisper in his ear after releasing him from her teeth.

"I can't believe it...I wanted this so much. I wanted you so much."

Hearing her speak undid him and he slammed into her several more times, the coil of tension building inside him as he fought to hang on. She moaned deeply and tilted her hips, wrapping her legs around his waist and bracing herself against the strength of his movements. His left shoulder shook as he transferred all his weight to it, snaking his right hand between them and stroking her to bring her with him.

"Fuck yes," she whispered, and the shock of hearing those words moaned with her voice sent Fitz careening over the edge. His final, almost graceless thrusts finished him, and his remaining focus was spent on continuing the movements of his hand as he felt her contracting around him.

They took several breathless moments to recover, kissing each other lazily as their bodies relaxed into bonelessness. She whimpered a little as he pulled out of her, but he took care of the business of disposing of the condom quickly and returned to the bed to pull her into his arms.

It wasn't long before they both fell asleep, fitting together on Fitz's tiny bed and getting the best night's rest either of them had seen in quite a long time.


	6. A Plan Emerges

They woke to the blaring of Fitz's alarm many hours later. His arm shot out from under the sheets and he grabbed it, roughly pounding on it to make the noise go away. Jemma moaned, sleepiness coloring her voice, but she came to her senses quickly and mastered herself enough to wrest the alarm from him and shut it off.

"Sorry," he offered, rubbing at one eye with the heel of his hand and yawning. "I should have turned off the alarm before we slept last night."

"Perhaps we should get up." She didn't sound excited at the prospect. "We do have work to do, make those adjustments we discussed last night."

Fitz slipped his hand, fingers splayed out, across her abdomen as he nodded thoughtfully at her. "I'm sure you're right," he agreed. "Hours of work to do in the lab."

"Very important work, I'm given to understand," she added. There was a gleam in her eyes he should have taken as a warning, but before he could think about anything else, she'd sat up and flipped around, pushing him flat on his back. She straddled his lap, her legs locking on either side of his hips and holding him firmly in place. While he was still blinking in surprise, she caught both of his wrists in her hands and shifted her weight upwards, pinning his arms over his head with as much strength as she could muster.

"Jemma…" he said, trying to sound stern, though to say he didn't mind what she was doing did not do justice to the wave of desire that washed over him.

"I'll try not to delay us for too long," she said, circling her hips lightly against him.

He was just starting to push up against her hands to try to get free when they were interrupted by his phone, beeping insistently for his attention. He tried to ignore it, but Jemma stopped moving and sat back.

"You should look at it, Fitz. It might be important."

"Are you completely mad? I mean, totally mental? If you think I'm going to...hey!" He yelped at her as she let his hands go and snatched the phone off the table. Her eyebrows went up as she glanced at it, then handed it to him.

"It's the Director, and it's an early enough hour that he wouldn't be looking for you if it weren't important."

"If you think for one second that I'd rather—"

"I'd rather avoid having anyone come and knock on the door to your quarters right now, Fitz. And we're two intelligent, efficient individuals who can make plenty of time for everything we need to do today. Perhaps we could resolve not to skip lunch today, maybe eat here in your quarters again?" She gave him a significant look that suggested she was not that concerned about the food in this lunch scenario.

His eyes widened, thinking about working in the lab with her all morning and trying to concentrate, knowing the entire time what she was planning for 'lunch'.

"But not if you don't answer your phone," she warned. "If that's important and you ignore it, it's likely to throw the entire day's schedule off."

"Fitz," he said, stabbing at the phone to connect the call and answering with determination. He nodded through the curt request for a meeting in the Director's office as soon as he was able, and as soon as there was an opening for him to talk he agreed, then cut off the call.

"He's asked to see you?" She was trying to look casual about it but he could see the anxiety she was hiding.

"Yeah. Didn't say why." He looked meaningfully at Jemma, reaching up to tuck an errant curl behind her ear. "Just because it seemed so urgent, it doesn't mean he's heard anything about Ward. It could be anything, honestly. You know how hard it is to get a read on Coulson."

"You're right, I know," she agreed, but she didn't sound convinced.

He leaned forward and gave her a quick kiss. "I'll get in the shower. When I'm done, you can use anything you can scrounge up here, if you'd like. I've got extras of just about everything, toothbrush, that sort of thing. Might be easier."

"In a place this small and with so many people we know, I'm afraid hoping for discretion might set us up for disappointment. I'm not concerned about it, though, unless you think it will cause some kind of problem?"

"No, no," he answered, quickly. He didn't want to give her any reason to think he regretted even a second of what had happened between then. "I just know you value your privacy and I didn't want you to feel uncomfortable."

"That's sweet, Fitz," she began, but then her voice changed to a tone he recognized as 'taking charge Jemma' and she continued, "but unless you want the Director here banging on your door, you need to get moving."

"All right, all right," he agreed. 

He got ready as quickly as he could and then found some way to leave his room behind even after taking in the sight of a naked Jemma Simmons tangled in the sheets of his bed. She was absent-mindedly biting on a fingertip as she studied one of his schematics on a tablet in her lap, but she looked up long enough to say goodbye as he pushed himself out the door.

The door closed behind him and he leaned on it for a minute, trying to convince himself that she was really in there and he hadn't just imagined all this. He nearly opened the door and peeked back in to make sure she was there just to reassure himself, but he decided that would look a bit strange. With an enormous measure of regret for what he was walking away from, he set off for Coulson's office.

"You wanted to see me, sir?" he asked once he arrived, leaning into the doorway.

"Agent Fitz, I was told you left last night on a non-necessary personal errand?"

Fitz nodded. He was confused for a moment, but when the meaning behind the question hit him, he felt like a prize moron.

"I'm guessing I shouldn't leave unless it's for a mission, and only then if my contribution is critical to its success?"

"Right in one," Coulson said, sarcasm breaking through in his tone. "What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't." Fitz blinked a few times, realizing how lucky they were that Ward hadn't been ready to grab him the moment he poked his head out from the base. If they'd wanted to know what Ward was after, he'd very nearly been treated to a first-hand look.

"I'm not sure I was clear about the level of risk we're dealing with here, but I thought showing you Ward's message would have gotten that across."

Fitz paced for a step or two, rubbing his fingers together with nervous energy while he thought. It was all coming together quickly in his head, but he was fully aware the idea was dangerous. Disastrous, if anything went wrong.

"Why don't we let him take me?" Fitz suggested, about to continue when Coulson interrupted him.

"You suddenly have aspirations to jump ship to Hydra?" Coulson deadpanned. "Why don't you just hand-deliver every piece of tech you've invented for us while we're at it?"

"I know it sounds risky, but what else can we do? Jemma and I can't stay locked up here indefinitely while we guess at what Ward's planning. Giving him more time just means he'll have a better plan, access to more resources. If we bait him into moving early, it might be our best chance to catch him off guard."

Coulson pressed his lips together thoughtfully. "You've seen what he's capable of...first hand, in fact. You'd be on your own until we could track you down."

"Yeah, but Jemma and I are on the verge of a breakthrough on those trackers you wanted. They'd be just the thing we could use to help you find me. I might even be able to plant one on Ward if I could get close enough. We might be able to take him into custody for good, end this whole thing."

"You'd be willing to take that chance?" Coulson asked, his eyes narrowing.

Fitz took a deep breath, trying to decide how much Coulson needed to know. "He's after Jemma. I have to do it. I have to finish this before he finds her."

Coulson nodded curtly and looked down at his desk, shuffling a few papers in front of him. "If this new tracker is integral to the success of the op, I'll need to see it in action before I give this my approval."

"We can show you a prototype today. I think we're very close to a finished product."

"Let me know when there's something for me to take a look at, then we'll talk about the op." Fitz turned to leave, but Coulson's voice stopped him. "And if I hear about you making any more uncleared trips off base—"

"Understood, sir."

Fitz walked briskly back to his quarters, trying to think of the best way to tell her what he'd just discussed with Coulson. He had a feeling she wouldn't be happy about his newest idea. He felt an absurd need to knock on his own door when he reached it, but he compromised by opening it just a crack and peeking in, quietly calling for Jemma so she wouldn't be startled by him.

"Fitz?" she answered, her voice muted through the bathroom door. "What was it?"

He turned around, scratching the back of his neck with nervous energy. He had to find a way to tell her that the smartest move at this point would be for him to intentionally allow himself to be captured by their most ruthless enemy. This was not a conversation likely to go well for him.

"Fitz?" she repeated, her voice clearer now as she opened the bathroom door. "Have you seen Coulson?"

"Yeah," he began, haltingly. Then he turned to face her, wanting to be as direct as possible with her, and then promptly swallowed his own tongue at the sight of her in the doorway.

Her hair was still tousled from sleep and there was a tiny spot of toothpaste hiding at the corner of her mouth. If that sight wasn't enough to make him want to barricade the door and not come out for a few weeks, she was also wearing his shirt from the previous night and, as far as he could tell, not another damn thing. 

He cleared his throat, desperately trying to think about something other than her bare legs and how they'd felt wrapped around his waist the night before. 

"Is it terrible?" she asked, the anxiousness in her tone escalating quickly. "What is it? How horrible is it if you can't find the words—"

"No, I'm sorry," he said, shaking his head clear. "I left the base to get the food last night. Obviously, given the situation with Ward—"

Jemma covered her mouth in shock. "Oh Fitz, how did we not realize...you could have been captured!"

"Some bloody geniuses we are—hey," he interrupted himself, the air whooshing out of him as she threw her arms around him. "It's okay, I'm right here," he said, comforting her, but he realized the plan he was about to propose would directly contradict the relief he had just given her.

"We must be more careful," she said, relaxing away from him enough to look into his eyes. "We were so distracted with…" she trailed off, as though she was trying to think of a genteel way to describe the way their relationship had just changed.

"Distractions," he supplied, earning himself a fond smile from the woman in his arms.

"Perhaps I could talk you into an early lunch filled with a few more distractions?" she asked, running her hands lightly across his back and swaying into him.

"I would like so very… _so_ very much to do that," he said, ducking his head toward hers and pulling her into a slow, exploratory kiss before pulling back again. "You are about to be very angry with me, however, and I think you'd be even more angry if we...had lunch...before I told you about my conversation with Coulson."

She gave him an expectant look and gestured for him to continue, so he took a deep breath and sat her down on the edge of the bed while he paced in front of her.

"So I was thinking about what would have happened if Ward had been ready to mobilize." Jemma visibly shivered and Fitz felt even worse about where he was about to steer the conversation. "That's when it occurred to me...those trackers we're working on would be perfect for allowing the team to maintain a known position on someone who's been captured. And we've got operatives who are experts in pursuit and surveillance, they'd easily be able to keep within the range of the tracker if we were able to widen the effective radius even a little. We'd never have a better chance at taking Ward down than if we forced him to make a move before he was ready."

"What are you talking about?" Jemma said, her eyes wide with shock. "You think we should deliberately allow ourselves to be captured?"

"No," he cut her off quickly. "He's not going to lay a finger on you. It only has to be one of us."

"Well, if you're not talking about—no. Absolutely not, Fitz. Did you think I could watch you do this any more than you could allow it to happen to me?"

"We can't just wait for his timetable to dictate what happens. We could be careful, but we can't go underground forever. Do you want to be trapped here until we can bring down Hydra? An organization that's been operating in the shadows since the 1940s, and we're going to wait them out?"

"He'll kill you," Jemma said, standing up. Conflict and pain played across her features and the set of her jaw told him she had no intentions of yielding.

Fitz scrubbed his hands over his face. "We can't wait. We have to move now."

"Then it's both of us," she said, her eyes fiery as she squared off with him. "It has to be both of us. We'll need to really make him believe he's won, let him get complacent. If he just has one of us, he'll still be plotting a way to get the other as well. We want him smug and overconfident."

"Absolutely not," he sputtered.

"You're acknowledging, then, that you know there's an enormous chance for this to go wrong, or for you to get badly hurt even if it does go to plan. If you were confident, there would be no problem with both of us doing it."

"Don't do that, don't try to turn this around."

"Don't use logic and reason to talk about this enormous risk you want to take, leaving me to sit on the sidelines and watch?" She found her clothes where she'd discarded them on the floor the previous night and took them into the bathroom with her, slamming the door behind her. "Perhaps I should have a talk with Coulson as well. You're not the only one who can have secret meetings and plot out the future without consulting anyone else," she continued, her icy tone clear even through the door.

"It wasn't a secret meeting, you were right there when I took the call from him."

She emerged from the bathroom, her dress pulled on slightly sideways with obvious haste. "You know precisely what I'm talking about, and if you'd remove your head from your posterior long enough to think about this rationally, you'd have to acknowledge that I'm correct. About all of it."

He caught her by the elbow and expected her to jerk her arm away in annoyance. He was gratified when she didn't, but instead, she froze in place and looked away from him. Even with her face turned away, he could see she was afraid as much or more than she was angry. There was more common ground here than it seemed, as he was feeling just as terrified as she looked.

"Jemma, please. I know we're not seeing eye to eye, but don't leave like this. We wasted a year—hell, we wasted the better part of a decade because we didn't just open our mouths and talk to each other."

"You came back here with a fully realized plan that you hadn't discussed with me. I wasn't the one who was unwilling to talk."

"If he gets his hands on both of us he'll use us against each other. If he was threatening to hurt you, do you think there's anything I wouldn't give him to keep him from doing it? There's nothing— _nothing_ —I wouldn't do."

"The team will just have to find us quickly, then."

"Please, Jemma." Panic was rising in him at the thought of Ward anywhere near her. He simply couldn't accept it, and he didn't care if he was in the wrong or the right.

"If you don't want to see me hurt, then you can't run off and give yourself up to Ward on your own. You can't cut me out when this is just as much my fight as it is yours. If you go out and get yourself killed just when we…" Her voice was breaking throughout her speech and when she turned to him, tears were streaming down her cheeks.

"C'mere," he whispered, pulling her into his arms. He sat them on the edge of his bed, clinging helplessly to each other. "I love you so much, Jemma. I can't think straight," he admitted. "I don't know what to do."

Jemma took his face in her hands, staring unblinkingly into his eyes. He thought back to the thousands of moments that led them here, every tiny, insignificant decision they'd made in their lives that had brought them together and had made them what they were in that moment. He would not let one man rob them of that. No matter what it took, even if it was something he didn't think he could bear.

"We'll let Coulson decide," he said, surprised at how calm and resolved he sounded. 

She blinked at him in surprise. "What do you mean—"

"The man's an expert at planning these operations. We aren't. Neither of us should make the call, he should. He'll give us the highest probability of success."

"You're sure you can accept whatever he decides?"

"I don't have to like it, but I want this finished and trusting him will give us the best chance of that." He tried to convey confidence, hiding any outward sign of the desperate churning in his stomach and the out of control panic of his heartbeat.

"No more meetings behind my back?"

"I won't keep anything from you."

"I love you, Leopold Fitz," she told him, just before he pulled her into another kiss. They clung together as though closing the distance between them would be enough to keep them safe, like their lives depended on it. 

The kisses got longer, more desperate, and it wasn't long before they both seemed to feel that kisses wouldn't be enough right now. As they started slowly removing each other's clothes, Fitz realized that the two of them, working together as only they could, might be the only chance they had to get through this alive.


	7. Hunter and Mack

Fitz looked up to see Coulson rounding the corner into the lab and he nervously began to arrange everything he and Jemma needed to show him. After their late start in the lab that morning they'd worked nonstop again, doing everything they could to increase the signal range on the tracker.

"What have you got for me, agents?"

Fitz saw Jemma's pleased reaction to being referred to as an agent despite her departure a year ago and wondered how much she missed the job. Not for the first time since the previous night, he considered what the future could hold for them. He knew they'd both considered leaving S.H.I.E.L.D. for a quieter life, but they hadn't ended up at the Academy or on Coulson's team on accident either. There was work here they both believed in, and that wasn't easy to let go of.

When Fitz didn't immediately begin to answer, Jemma stepped in and started them off. "Fitz had quite a solid design to start with so the work has gone quickly. We've been able to reduce the size of the device exponentially, making it small enough to ingest. That's how we propose to evade discovery of the device."

Fitz cleared his throat to interrupt. "That breakthrough is thanks to the research Jemma brought with her, that's the part she's leaving out. We're using the human body itself to boost the signal strength and after making that change and a few others, it was possible to eliminate roughly half of the previous design's components."

"I was only able to see the application of my research after seeing Fitz's idea to camouflage the signal transmission as natural electromagnetic radiation—"

"—which only really works because of her adjustments to the materials that make the tracker invisible to any scan, otherwise it'd be a dead giveaway."

Coulson smirked, looking back and forth between them as they kept interrupting to heap praise on the other's work. 

"Sounds promising. Can I see a test?"

Fitz picked up a clamp and carefully selected one tiny tracker prototype from a plastic tray, walking it to Coulson to let him get a closer look at it.

"That's it?"

"It's quite compact," Fitz noted, releasing the clamp over his opened mouth and swallowing. "Can't even really feel it in my mouth on its own. Hidden in food or drink, it would be impossible for anyone to realize it was there."

"It doesn't activate until it's inside the body, once the charge reaches a certain threshold." She paused, waiting for the tablet in her hand to burst to life, then smiling once it did. "There we are. The signal would look like this were it to be intercepted," she said, pointing to a waveform on the top half of the screen, "which as we said before, mimics the kind of natural background signal present in nearly any environment on Earth."

"So it looks like...white noise?" Coulson asked.

Fitz turned to Jemma and they shared a look, wordlessly debating between the two of them if it was worth communicating what a gross oversimplification that description was, but as it was enough for Coulson to approximate an understanding of the nature of the signal, they silently concurred that it wasn't worth the trouble. 

Fitz took the tablet from her and continued the explanation seamlessly. "Once the signal runs through this decryption algorithm, you get a wealth of data. There's a small readout of stats from the host we can use as a partial verification that the tracker has embedded in the intended subject. But most importantly, it sends as much data as possible that will help us follow the signal back to its location."

Simmons took over. "We've been struggling with calibrating the signal strength and we initially assumed the maximum range would be on the order of a mile's radius—"

"—but a breakthrough we made three hours ago—"

"—a breakthrough _Fitz_ made three hours ago—"

"—has increased the effective range five fold, at least. So a five mile radius, maybe more, depending on the subject's body composition, how many structures are between the tracker and the receiver, and weather conditions in the surrounding area," Fitz finished, triumphantly pointing to the data rapidly scrolling down the screen of the tablet.

"I assume you'd like to do a few more tests?" Coulson asked.

"Just a few, but we're remarkably confident in this one," Jemma answered. "Given the data we're seeing, the operation of the device seems very consistent."

"The op we discussed this morning, Agent Fitz?" Coulson asked, clearly fishing for some sign from Fitz about how openly they should discuss this in front of Simmons.

"She knows everything, sir. No need to be vague."

When that earned him a raised eyebrow from Coulson, it suddenly occurred to Fitz that Jemma technically was no longer a part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and he had shared information about what would be a secret op with her. He'd been cleared to seek out Jemma's help in the lab, but nothing had been said about including her in conversations about the use of the device or any other operational information that Fitz was privy to.

"I mean," Fitz stammered, trying to think of the best way to make this argument. "She's the one Ward is after. I thought her input might provide a necessary second perspective on—"

Coulson chuckled, breaking his stone-faced persona for a moment as he looked down at the floor, shaking his head a little. "To be perfectly clear, I'm not concerned about any security leaks here." He straightened again and his face was impassive; Agent Coulson was back to business. "Assuming you're satisfied with the results of your final tests, we can start planning the op we discussed. I believe the best way to draw out Ward is to wait until the next intel we get regarding a Hydra operation, bring Fitz on the mission, and make Ward think he's grabbing you while the rest of the team is focused on another objective."

"Sir," Jemma began, her voice a self-contradictory hybrid of determination and hesitancy. "Ward isn't just trying to capture Fitz, he's after me as well. Have you considered the possibility that we'll have a better chance of overall success if we allow him to capture both of us? We want him complacent, thinking he's won. Sending both of us in could be the best way to achieve that."

Coulson's expression was thoughtful and it seemed to Fitz that he took quite a long time before he spoke again. "I'll take the idea under advisement. Allowing either of you to fall into his hands already puts a lot at risk and I'm not sending anyone anywhere before I feel confident in the extraction phase, but I'll consider all scenarios. You're both willing to do this?"

Fitz nodded and stole a glance at Jemma as she did as well. He felt sick, his body rebelling against the idea that Ward might get his hands on her.

"I'll contact you for a mission briefing soon. Continue your testing, but…" Coulson hesitated, narrowing his eyes at both of them. "Make sure you take some time outside the lab. This will be a tough op and I'll need you both fresh."

"Yes sir," Jemma answered, while Fitz merely nodded again. He couldn't imagine feeling prepared to take on Ward, not if Jemma could be in jeopardy as well.

Coulson disappeared into the darkened corridor and Fitz fidgeted with some instruments that were out on the lab table in front of him, feeling as though he needed that time away from the lab immediately. He needed to clear his head. So much had happened in the past 48 hours and there was still plenty to come.

"If you think we could take a short break now before beginning our final testing, I thought I might go looking for Daisy," Jemma said, breaking into Fitz's thoughts, her tone tentative. "I've been sending messages to my parents fairly regularly and I don't want them to worry. Perhaps Daisy can help me—"

"I can help you find a method to contact them that won't give away—" he cut himself off, seeing the conflict on Jemma's face.

"I was hoping to do a little catching up with her as well. I know she's doing a very different job now, but if she had just a moment and wouldn't mind dusting off some of her hacker skills…"

Fitz took in Jemma's hesitance and realized she needed to talk with someone...decidedly someone other than himself. She needed another point of view, perhaps about the Ward situation, but possibly also about everything that had happened between the two of them after dinner the previous night. It made him feel oddly self-conscious as he considered how much Jemma might share with one of their mutual friends, but he knew any reservations he had were selfish. Of course she needed to talk with someone, and of course he'd never deny her that.

"I'm sure she'd love to see you, and I can't imagine she'd mind helping you contact your parents," he said, pretending to study a data point on the monitor in front of him. 

"I'd still like us to eat together, if that's all right with you. Do you think you could wait?"

"Of course," he said, keeping his tone light. He didn't want her to worry about him feeling uneasy. She crossed the room and, looking around first to ensure they were alone, she planted a quick, light kiss on his lips. Fitz caught her arms as she started to pull away, then met her in a longer, more insistent kiss.

"I'll see you soon," she whispered when they parted. Her cheeks were a little flushed and she looked adorably flustered, but underneath that, happy. With that one simple expression, Fitz knew he had nothing to fear, at least nothing from Jemma or any of their teammates and friends.

Once she was gone, he felt a bit aimless in the lab. There was work to be done, but he'd lost his drive to complete it once she wasn't by his side any longer. It wasn't lost on him that this was true of most of the last year of his life, as well. He quickly shuffled their materials into a drawer, smiling when he imagined Jemma scolding him later for not straightening the work area properly.

Not wanting Jemma to think he was following her or anything ridiculous like that, he headed in the opposite direction from Daisy's quarters. That took him past a common area where Mack and Hunter were locked in heated battle in a video game, both of them clutching controllers and shouting trash talk at each other.

"Comin' for you, mate," Hunter threatened, crouching oddly on the chair instead of sitting properly, as though the game was somehow played with full body input. 

"You only know where I am because you screen cheat," Mack accused, but without any real annoyance behind it.

Fitz walked in and stood behind them to watch, but both players seemed to be too engrossed to notice he'd come in.

"It's a valid part of the strategy! Why would they put us on the same screen if we weren't meant to use it for recon?"

"There's only one screen," Mack pointed out, ducking his head as he directed his character through a low-clearance bunker. With a complicated-looking roll maneuver, Mack was suddenly behind Hunter's character and it was a bare second after that before Hunter's half of the screen went red and a respawn timer appeared.

"Oi, that's cheating," Hunter complained. At Mack's look of confusion, Hunter explained further. "Being better than me. That's cheating."

Both men laughed, then greeted Fitz as they put their controllers down.

"Haven't seen much of you today, Turbo," Mack said, his voice even, but a knowing look passed between Mack and Hunter as he said it.

"Well, been busy in the lab. Tracker project, you know," he said, and he got quiet, thoughtful nods from his conversation partners. Suspiciously quiet and thoughtful, actually.

"Been strange having Simmons back?" Hunter asked, his tone all innocence and nonchalance, as though he was merely asking to be polite.

"Wish she could have come back under different circumstances, of course. And at first, I'll admit it was odd having her back after she's been gone for so long, but it's all going quite well."

"Quite well," Hunter echoed, giving Mack a significant look. Mack made a noncommittal humming noise in response, also a bit too theatrically.

"All right, you two. What's going on?" Fitz asked, hoping they could put all their cards on the table and he could get whatever was coming out of the way without all this dancing around. 

Hunter and Mack looked at each other and shrugged, then Hunter took a deep breath and began to answer, the words coming out of his mouth at rapid-fire speed. "Simmons was just here, looking for Daisy. It happens that Bobbi was also here, watching me wipe the floor with Mack in this game—"

"I was winning," Mack interjected, as though this was the most important part of the story to get right.

"—as I said," Hunter continued, ignoring Mack entirely, "Bobbi was here watching me—"

"She kept trying to take his controller because he was making 'glaring tactical errors'," Mack cheerfully added, laughing harder when Hunter scowled at him and Fitz couldn't help laughing along.

"So Bobbi, wrenching herself away from watching my considerable skill and prowess," Hunter said, raising his voice, "volunteered to go with Simmons to help her find Daisy." He looked pointedly at Fitz. "So they're all together by now, presumably. Daisy, Bob, and Simmons. Talking. The three of them."

Fitz frowned at him, then looked at Mack for some kind of explanation. He'd get no help there, as Mack was also giving him some kind of strange look, as though Fitz should have figured out what they were talking about by now.

Hunter groaned, covering his eyes with both hands. "You, mate. They're off somewhere talking about you."

Fitz shrugged. "Jemma was hoping to get a message to her parents and she was hoping Daisy could help her," Fitz explained, mildly affronted when his friends looked at him as though he was some kind of simpleton. Of course he knew they might discuss something to do with him, but he didn't see the need to obsess about it. He trusted Jemma, and that was all he needed to know.

"Are you suddenly unable to use a computer? Did you lose all those skills you have, where you could easily have gotten a message through that was untraceable? You have the same clearances and access Daisy has, and this is hardly rocket science."

"She wanted to catch up with Daisy as well," Fitz answered, amused at the levels of paranoia Hunter believed were necessary just because Jemma might discuss something having to do with him with some of their friends.

"That's code," Mack said, leaving it mysteriously at that.

"That's right," agreed Hunter, who then huffed in frustration. "Ugh, he's still not seeing it. That's code for them talking about you."

"Well..." Fitz stalled, wondering how much Hunter and Mack could possibly know already. They seemed to know there was something to talk about other than Jemma returning to S.H.I.E.L.D. for protection from Ward, but how could anything much more than that be common knowledge already?

"You don't want to talk, fine," Hunter said, flailing his arms and pacing as he spoke. "Stood by you for years. I still call the astronaut 'hog face' to this day. You'd think—"

"I've asked you repeatedly not to do that, not to call him 'hog face'," Fitz pointed out.

"Yeah, but we're close enough mates that I knew you didn't really mean it," Hunter answered.

"Right, you've got me there," Fitz had to admit, once he took a moment to think about it. Hunter's advice and support was often immature and a bit facile, but Fitz couldn't deny that it made him feel better most of the time.

"We had dinner last night, Jemma and I," Fitz told them. "Caught up."

"And hog face?" Hunter asked.

"Hasn't seen him in a year," Fitz answered, unable to hide a small smile. "Had no plans of being with him when she left S.H.I.E.L.D., as it turns out," he ventured to add, feeling unsettlingly like he was sharing information he perhaps shouldn't.

"So how did dinner go?" Hunter said, practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Fitz fidgeted uncomfortably, shifting his weight from right leg to left leg and suddenly finding an errant thread on the sofa cushion fascinating.

"Bobbi saw Simmons leaving your quarters this morning," Mack added, apparently growing tired of Hunter's leading questions. "What you do is your business, man," he said, ducking his head to catch Fitz's eye. "We're just bringing it up in case you need a sounding board." Mack looked pointedly at Hunter, who did not look as reluctant to pry details out of Fitz.

"I appreciate it," Fitz said, honestly touched and remembering back to days when he did not have friends like this, or at least real friends other than Simmons. "I'd say something, but I think it would be ungentlemanly to...talk about the specifics?"

"But there are specifics?" Hunter clarified. At Fitz's nod, Hunter looked like he wanted to dance around and fist pump, or jump up and give Fitz what would certainly be the most awkward high five in recorded history. Somehow, though, he managed to keep himself in check.

"You two are okay?" Mack asked.

"Yeah, we're okay," Fitz answered, hoping his face didn't give away all the secrets he was trying to keep. "We still have to figure out this threat from Ward, but…"

"Got some unfinished business with that one, myself," Hunter said, his tone sounding light, but Fitz could hear the grimness beneath. "Anything you need, I'm in. You don't even have to ask." Before Fitz could thank him, he continued, "But for now, the pints are on me, lads." Hunter grinned at them, slipping into the break room next door.

"Does Hunter have every fridge in this bloody place stocked with beer?" Fitz wondered aloud.

"Yeah," Mack answered, as though Fitz's question was ridiculous, then he clapped Fitz on the back as they both got up to grab a bottle from a returning Hunter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hunter & Mack & Fitz is the best BroT3. (Also acceptable: Coulson & Hunter & Fitz.)


	8. Studying

The next afternoon, Fitz found himself in the Director's office. Jemma was sitting in an identical chair next to him, looking as nervous as he felt.

They'd met for dinner the previous night in his quarters, having some food that they had cobbled together from the somewhat basic stores available on the base. Jemma had contributed a rather nice bottle of wine, and at Fitz's questioning look, she'd explained that Bobbi had offered it to her when they'd 'run into each other' earlier that afternoon.

Fitz reasoned that he probably should feel a bit rattled that their new romantic relationship seemed to be a topic of conversation, but he honestly didn't care. If anything, it made him realize how much their friends cared about both of them, and that was a rather nice thing to know.

Coulson's call the night before to set up this meeting had come at a somewhat inopportune moment, just after Jemma had pulled her shirt over her head and Fitz had released the clasp on the back of her bra. Again, Jemma had been the one to insist on checking the phone, and she'd pressed Fitz to take the call. Humorously, she'd done her bra back up as Fitz spoke to Coulson, as though the man could see her somehow through the voice-only connection. Fitz had teased her for that once the call was done, leading her to tickle him in those places only she knew were ticklish, and that had led to—

"Afternoon, both of you," Coulson said, immediately upon entry to his office and interrupting Fitz's rather enjoyable thoughts about the previous night. "We received some intel about a move Hydra will be making on a weapons storage facility in three days. Now this is either legitimate, or it's Ward playing some kind of game of cat and mouse. Either way, we need to be ready to move."

"You think this is our opportunity?" Fitz asked, quashing the strong desire he had to grab Jemma's hand when he saw her react to Coulson's news out of the corner of his eye.

"I'm not sure we'll get a better one."

"Excuse me, sir. You said Ward could be playing some kind of game. Do you think he could be trying to set a trap?" Simmons asked.

"It could be," Coulson acknowledged. "Even if he is, I'm confident he won't see the rest of our plan coming. Ward will assume we're trying to capture him at the storage facility. Once he gets away with both of you, he'll think he's won. While he's busy counting you as assets, we'll be tracking you back to whatever location he's using as a base. We'll get you out of there and try to capture Ward, but even if he slips through our fingers, anything else we can get there will be likely to have strategic significance."

At 'both of you', Fitz's heart sank. He'd been holding out hope that Coulson would advocate sending only one of them in.

"Both of us, sir?" Simmons asked, her voice shaking a little. Fitz felt terrible about it, but he hoped the hesitancy in her tone might make Coulson reconsider.

"If you're still willing to go in with Fitz," Coulson answered. "I know you've been out of the game for awhile—"

"I'm willing," Simmons answered quickly, nodding her head decisively. "I'll do whatever we need to do."

"You'll both have trackers before you allow yourself to be captured, but I'd like you to try to plant one on Ward as well. We'll be able to differentiate between the three, won't we?"

"Yes," Simmons confirmed. "The biometrics you'll receive from each tracker will be different, based on variations between our physiologies."

"It may be difficult to get a tracker into Ward, so I'd like both of you to be prepared to do it. We have no idea what his immediate plans for you may be, so we also won't know which of you might be able to get close enough to plant the device first. Sending both of you in will not only give Ward a bigger sense of false security, it also doubles our chances that we'll be able to track and hunt him down."

Fitz nodded again, silently hating every moment of the briefing and wishing he'd never given this idea to Coulson in the first place.

"We'll have a preliminary mission briefing tomorrow. If everything looks good, the op will be a go." Coulson laid two identical-looking manilla folders on his desk, one in front of each of them, and they both reached forward to pick them up. "Study those materials on the weapon storage facility. Memorize everything you can. We have no way of knowing what might be useful on the day."

"Yes, sir," he and Jemma both said, and when it was clear Coulson had finished, they filed out of his office.

Once outside Coulson's closed door, they looked at each other, then at the folders in their hands.

"We could go back to the lab," Jemma suggested.

"We could," Fitz agreed. "But I'm not much in the mood right now. I'd do better work tomorrow."

Jemma nodded. "Perhaps we should study these," she said, holding up her folder. The worried look on her face disappeared behind a mask of efficient practicality, but Fitz could tell she was acting more confident than she felt. "Most of fear is about the unknown. It stands to reason that the more prepared we are with the details, the less anxiety we'll have about the mission in general."

Fitz took a deep breath, trying to sort out the dozens of reactions he could give her in response. On the face of it she was right, of course. They _should_ begin to study the mission documents and memorize anything that might be helpful. Her suggestion was the most practical reaction. There was also his time-forged urge to tease her that studying was her answer to any problem, which is what the Fitz straight out of the academy would have done. 

The Fitz who loved her more than he'd believed possible, the one who was loved in return by this brilliant and sometimes infuriating woman, he owed her more than that. She was indirectly admitting to being anxious, something he had to acknowledge he couldn't really fix for either of them. 

Whatever he did, though, it needed to be something that pulled them together, rather than pulling them apart. Teasing her and grousing about her homework addiction or her annoying tendency toward compulsive over-preparedness had been fine when the only way he could think of to get her notice was to provoke her. He blinked, realizing with a bit of a shock that they were beyond that now.

He took her folder and carried it with his, using his free hand to hold hers as he led her gently down the hallway. 

"Let's get some quiet for a bit, then we can start analyzing what Coulson's given us. How about your quarters?"

She crinkled her nose and shook her head. "It's a bit bare in there. Empty might perhaps be a better word to describe it. I didn't have time to bring much with me."

"My quarters, then. I'll make us some tea and meet you there."

Jemma reached for the folders and Fitz debated pulling them away from her, but he knew she'd just pace and think about the mission anyway, even if he deprived her of the data.

"Don't plan the whole thing out before I get there," he chided, and his mock irritability actually pulled a smile out of her.

***

An hour later, the two of them were engrossed in paperwork in his quarters. Fitz was sitting in a chair with his feet on the bed and Jemma was the reverse, lying on the bed with her feet in Fitz's lap. He was absent-mindedly rubbing the arch of one of her feet with one hand while he held a paper up with the other.

"Why didn't we ever study like this at the academy?" Jemma wondered aloud, looking up from the papers in her lap.

"We did study like this at the academy," Fitz began, then corrected himself. "Well, not like _this_ ," he said, dropping the paper to his lap and doing his best to make Jemma's foot rub as lascivious as possible, purely for effect.

When Jemma threw her head back and moaned, he quickly reconsidered the 'purely for effect' part.

"Do you remember the night before that horrible exam, the one where we had to know the S.H.I.E.L.D. regulation manual backward and forward?" she asked, her eyes sparkling with amusement.

Fitz groaned. He remembered it quite well and probably always would. It was the only exam he couldn't get through on raw intelligence with just a bit of rote memorization sprinkled in. There was no innate logic to the regulation manual, no way to memorize a few equations and use them to derive the rest of what he needed. He couldn't even take it apart to understand it, as much of the reasoning behind the information inside boiled down to a slightly formalized version of, 'because we said so.'

"That was an _awful_ night," Simmons agreed.

"You had the entire thing memorized before we even started!" Fitz protested. "You bloody teased me all night long while you were quizzing me. I kept getting everything wrong, all the sections mixed up. Thought I was going to be out on my arse."

"I was really worried for you, but I knew you'd get it eventually."

Fitz laughed. "What made you think of that now?"

Jemma looked down, biting her lip. "It's the first time I remember...I wanted you to kiss me that night."

"No, you didn't!" Fitz said, his mouth dropping open in shock.

"Excuse me, I'm sure I'm remembering the night accurately."

"That's not what I mean. You didn't think anything like that back then. We were...you did?"

"I didn't let myself think about it often, but it happened sometimes. I was pretty sure you didn't see me that way. You were still recovering from hating me for the first few months."

"I don't know where you got the idea I didn't like you. You've said that before and I keep telling you it wasn't true."

"Fitz, you wouldn't even look at me. I asked you direct questions and got silence or a one word answer. It's all right, I wasn't used to having a rival either. It took me some time to adjust to the idea as well."

Fitz carefully transferred her feet from his lap onto the bed, then moved to sit on the mattress next to her hip, facing her. "I wasn't worried about having a rival or any utter tripe like that. You were a girl, a beautiful one at that, and you seemed to be interested in talking to me. Once I started listening instead of just hearing alarms in my head when you looked at me, I found out how bloody brilliant you are and the idea of finding something good enough to say to you became even more impossible."

"Silly Fitz," she whispered, looking at him as though she was trying to make sense of something and he was the only one with the answer. "I'm really scared, Fitz." 

"So am I," he admitted. "Listen, let's promise right now to think about what we do have control over, not what we don't. If we can't do that, then we'll try not to think about any of this at all. I know you want to chew over everything that could possibly go wrong to prepare for any eventuality, but that's not what's going to get us out of this one. Staying focused on our part of the mission and trusting Hunter and Bobbi and whoever else Coulson puts on extraction is what's going to work."

She nodded, still not looking quite convinced.

"Come on, we'll see if we can each sketch out these maps from memory. I'll race you," he offered.

"It's a wonderful idea, Fitz, but perhaps a little later."

"Afraid I'll win?" he asked, raising an eyebrow at her.

Wordlessly, she shook her head, then sat forward until she could wrap her arms around his shoulders. "I think I'm about to start over-preparing."

"All right, then, we'll take a break. Go for a walk, or perhaps—"

She stopped him with a kiss, then drew back. "What I really need is your help. A distraction for an hour or two should do it. You don't mind, do you?"

Their eyes locked and held as their breaths mingled in the air between them. She began to lie back and he moved to cover her, a hand cupping her cheek as he pulled her into a longer kiss.


	9. Showdown

Over the next three days, the time passed so quickly Fitz developed a distrust for every clock he encountered. Minutes and hours slipped through their fingers as they tried desperately to hold them back, working together and trying to make up for the time they'd lost.

The mission plan put Hunter, Bobbi, Mack, and Daisy on the team to counter-assault the weapons storage facility, also making them the de-facto extraction team. May would pilot and remain with Coulson in the jet, both of them serving as backup should anything go wrong.

Fitz couldn't be more confident or trusting of a team than this one, but once the mission began and he and Jemma transferred to the surveillance van to drive away from their teammates, he felt as though they should have simply have plastered a target on the side of the van.

"We'll be fine, Fitz," she said, leaning over to cover his hand with hers where it rested on the steering wheel. "Your patch is still in place?"

He resisted the urge to poke under his shirt and run a hand over the synthetic skin patch Jemma had applied to his abdomen, which hid a small cache of their trackers underneath. Jemma had a matching one near her waist (he'd applied it himself, though he hadn't exactly maintained proper clinical detachment as he'd brushed the material over her delicate skin.) They'd both already ingested a tracker and Fitz had verified with Daisy that they were broadcasting a strong, even signal before Coulson had set the op in motion. They carried these surplus trackers in the hopes of planting one on Ward or one of his lieutenants. With no way to inject it, they'd have to get creative looking for a way to get one inside Ward's body.

Fitz pulled the van into the spot he'd come to refer to in his own thoughts as the 'sitting duck location'. They sat together in the front of the van, pretending to consult tablets and speak into mission comms, but really, they were just there to wait to be grabbed.

Mission parameters called for them to exit the van on the pretense of setting up a device outside. It was just a dummy device, bits and pieces of other things, moving parts meant to suggest it was some new tech they were using to support the rest of the team. 

It wasn't long after they showed their faces outside that a small team of Ward's men surrounded them. Fitz had to bite back a desperate, last-minute urge to tell Jemma to run when he saw them approaching and instead, he pretended to be too fixated on the device to notice their presence.

They went through a charade of surprise as they held their hands up, Fitz growling under his breath and clenching his fists when one of the men roughly patted Jemma down to check for hidden weapons, then handcuffed her and threw a black bag over her head. That was the last thing he saw before a second bag covered his own head, then he felt a sharp pain as something struck him, hard, on the back of the neck and his world went truly black.

***

Fitz blinked groggily, coming to and trying to pull his hand up to rub away the ache on the back of his neck, but he found his arms were bound behind him. He tested his bonds, which felt like a thick zip-tie closed painfully tight around his wrists with his arms pulled together behind the back of the chair he was sitting on.

"Fitz!" The sound of Jemma's voice cleared the rest of his mental fog and he blinked against the light in the too-bright room to find her. She was bound to a chair at the other side of the room, similar to his own confinement.

"Jemma. Are you okay?"

She nodded, though she looked down at her lap and he saw a tear drop from her chin before she managed to look up again and meet his eyes.

"How long was I out?"

"Not long, I'd estimate you were unconscious for about a half hour. I was surprised...they didn't bring us far, but they did stuff us into another car, so it was hard to estimate. There were a lot of turns, but I think we might be about...five miles from the rest of the team? Perhaps a little more?"

Fitz understood the significance of what she was telling him, letting him know they were at the very edge of the usable range of the trackers. They could expect the extraction team to be delayed while they tried to find and follow their tracking signals.

"Are you nauseous? Dizzy? Headache?" she continued.

"Headache definitely, but that's all," he said, reassuring her. She'd be worried about a concussion, especially as he was particularly susceptible after his previous traumatic brain injury.

"You'll need to stay awake."

"I'm not feeling drowsy. It's not too bad, I promise. I'd tell you if it was."

Her response died on her lips as the door flew open and Ward stepped through. He pulled a chair noisily across the floor and flipped it around, sitting on it backwards and bracing his folded arms on its back.

"I feel like it's been forever since the three of us saw each other," Ward said. "'I've been waiting impatiently for our little reunion, and now that Fitz has decided to join us—"

"Your pack of goons knocked him out," Jemma spat out. "If you were so anxious—"

"Still feisty, I see," Ward interrupted, then turned to Fitz. "She's a firecracker, isn't she? But then again, you always knew that."

"What do you want, Ward?" Fitz asked, tired of listening to Ward trying to provoke them.

"Maybe I just want to kill you. Finish the job I should have done a few years ago."

"Rubbish," Jemma answered. "If you wanted us dead, you'd have done it by now."

"Maybe I wanted him to watch you go," Ward answered, his voice hard as he got up and leaned down to speak just inches from Jemma's face. "If I wanted that, I had to wait for him to wake up, didn't I?"

"Then do it," she said, jutting her chin forward in defiance.

"No!" Fitz yelled, not faking anything for Ward's benefit, but full of genuine terror.

Ward whirled around, a tooth-bearing smile returning to his mouth. "See, it's that right there. That's what I was hoping for. He'd do anything to keep me from hurting you. Isn't that sweet?" Neither of them answered, so he continued. "He actually sounds a lot like you did, Simmons, when I came in here and put a gun to his head a few minutes ago. Do you remember what I asked you?"

Fitz watched Jemma's expression harden and she pushed her lips together, refusing to answer.

"Maybe you need a reminder," Ward said. He pulled a gun from the holster slung across his back and cocked it inches away from Fitz's temple.

"You asked if I would miss him," she said, her voice small and shaky.

"I thought you had a better memory than that," Ward said, pressing the gun into Fitz's skin.

"You asked if I would miss him when you splattered what was left of his brain on the wall behind him."

"See now? Was that so difficult?" Ward asked, putting the gun away. Fitz watched tears fall freely down Jemma's face and Fitz's thoughts blanked, his mind filled only with murderous rage.

"What do you want," Fitz gritted out between his clenched teeth, the words coming slowly and dripping with every threat he was in no position to make. He tried to breathe through the anger and push it aside, a skill Bobbi and Mack had talked about using in the field to focus themselves when under duress.

"This is your little test. Coulson and your little friends are still battling my team and they don't even know that you're gone yet. If you don't do what I want, you'll never make it out of this room. I'll dump you out on the pavement for them to find and I'll move on. And I want a lot of things, but we'll start with an endotoxin. Well, that's what I want from you, Simmons. Fitz is going to give me the delivery system for it. Complete those tasks and you get to leave here alive."

Jemma's eyebrows went up in mild surprise at the word 'endotoxin' and Fitz waited to see if she would say anything to provide any clarification. He knew roughly what it meant, but what Jemma chose to say about it now would most likely be a hint for Fitz, providing the foundation of whatever plan they forged to stall Ward long enough for the extraction team for find them.

"Why would you want an endotoxin? Are you planning to murder people and make it look like a bacterial outbreak?" Jemma asked.

Ward didn't answer, but instead, walked back to the sole door leading out of the windowless room, reached out for something, and then returned with some papers. He held one in front of Jemma's face.

"We have these plans for bioengineering the toxin, but no one here can make it work. That's what you're going to do." Ward shuffled to another paper, then walked to Fitz and showed it to him. "This is a model of a liquid jet injector. You're going to build me one that can deliver the endotoxin. I'm told the off-the-shelf models built for vaccines won't work with the toxin we're designing. You're going to make one that does, but it will look exactly like this one."

"And if we don't?" Fitz asked.

"Depends which one of you is reluctant to contribute your skills. There's a lot I can do to you—to either of you—and still make it possible for you to work. You don't build this thing," Ward said, shaking the paper in Fitz's face, "and she suffers. Do you want me to tell you _how_ I'll make her suffer?"

"No," Fitz said, spitting the word in Ward's face.

"Keep resisting, and I'll just kill you. Both of you." Ward paused, letting his threat sink in. "We have everything you'll need to get working, so I'm going to get a couple of guys to show you to your new lab facilities."

***

Fitz blinked at the schematic Ward had given him, then looked at the parts scattered on the bare metal table he was chained to. He'd considered every possible way of getting free, but the table was welded to the floor and the shackle around his ankle seemed too difficult to circumvent. The armed guards in the room watching every move they made were also quite a deterrent, both of them keeping their distance and a wary hand on their guns at all times.

"Fitz, I'm having trouble finding a suspension to place the endotoxin in that doesn't cause the bacteria to lyse too rapidly."

"Shut up, girlie," barked one of Ward's armed goons.

"Your commander or whatever he fancies calling himself brought the two of us here together because he knows what we can accomplish when we are allowed to collaborate. This is how we work together, we talk about the barriers we encounter until we find the solution," Jemma returned, her voice hard and full of fatigue. 

Fitz blinked a few times, looking at her as she kicked at the chain binding her to a table identical to his, but at the far end of the room. He didn't know anything that would be helpful to her to solve the problem she'd voiced and he only vaguely understood the concept of bacterial lysis. However, the idiots in the room with them didn't know that. She must be trying to get some other message to him through what she was asking him.

He searched his memory of years-ago biology classes and considered other projects he and Jemma had worked on, trying to find a connection between what she'd said and anything that might be useful for her to communicate to him. Lysing had something to do with the breaking down of a cell membrane. In the context of an endotoxin, that would be the moment the toxin was released to the host.

"You need to delay the lysing of the bacteria," he ventured, immediately seeing a spark of hope in her eyes. Yes, this was it, she was trying to tell him something and it was buried in the question she asked him.

"Exactly, but the suspension called for here is inadequate to delay the process. It would be particularly susceptible to sonication." Jemma stressed the final word, leaning into it just enough for Fitz to follow the trail of breadcrumbs she was leaving for him.

"Instead of protecting the bacteria until injection using the suspension liquid, why don't I put an air layer in the barrel of the delivery mechanism to insulate it from vibration?" The words spilled from Fitz's lips as his brain whirred with a completely different set of plans.

"Can you do that without altering the outer design? It's meant to look exactly like the sample injector you were given."

"It's not a problem, it can be hidden inside the barrel. How much room for the liquid suspension will you need?"

"Ten CCs," she answered quickly.

Fitz looked at the assortment of materials on the table in front of him and found enough there to make the changes she needed him to make. "It's handled," he said, simply, and she actually managed to smile at him despite everything.

***

At some point, Ward had entered the room and watched the two of them work, staying as silent and menacing as the guards. Fitz tried to keep his hands from shaking as he pieced the last components together, drawing the job out as long as he could without straining the bounds of believability. He'd already feigned a problem after assembling it the first time and insisted it had to be torn apart and rebuilt, buying them a precious few minutes. Every moment that went by made him worry that something had gone wrong with their trackers, or the team was having too much trouble evading Ward's people to locate them so far away from their initial location.

Fitz risked a glance at Jemma where she was leaning on her table, her work already completed and sitting in a small bottle in front of her. She wrung her hands occasionally, refusing to look toward Ward or his two guards.

"That looks finished to me," Ward announced as Fitz reluctantly slid the last component into place. He grabbed the vial from Jemma's table and brought it to Fitz, holding it out and indicating with a jut of his chin that Fitz should introduce the endotoxin into the delivery chamber.

Hoping that he had read Jemma's veiled comments correctly, he pushed the tumbler back that would pierce the lid of the bottle and allowed the liquid to rush into the chamber. When it was done, he removed the bottle, looked directly at Jemma, and shook the injector vigorously. The little flare of victory he saw in Jemma's eyes let him know he had done exactly as she'd hoped.

"Have to clear any air bubbles out of the chamber," he explained, then wondered if explaining had drawn attention to his shaking of the injector that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

"So it's ready, then?" Ward asked, taking the device from Fitz and looking at it from a few different angles.

"Yes," both scientists answered in unison. Ward smiled again.

"So, I suppose I need a test subject," he said, holding the injector close to Fitz's arm.

"No!" Jemma cried, and Fitz wondered if he had it all wrong, if the shaking hadn't just lysed the endotoxin in the chamber, beginning a very rapid process of breaking down until it was inert. If he was right, the material in the injector was completely harmless. Perhaps it needed more time, or she could be simply reacting the way she believed Ward expected her to react.

Ward smiled, but withdrew the injector from Fitz's arm. He crossed over to Jemma, hovering close to her arm instead.

"What do you think, Fitz? Want to watch your invention kill your little girlfriend here?"

"Get that away from her," Fitz warned. He was completely helpless and could do nothing to make good on the threat, but he issued it anyway. 

Ward smiled again. "You passed my little test. If either of you had failed to give me what I want, you wouldn't have been so worried about me using this on you. You're both terrible liars, there's no way you could have faked that. And you have nothing to worry about now. As long as you continue to give me what I want, I'll let you live." He cracked the door open and yelled down the hallway, "All right, we're heading out."

Just when Fitz was trying to think of what their next move would be if they were moved from this location, he felt a tremor under his feet. It was still subtle, but he would recognize that vibration anywhere. He looked at Jemma to see if she'd realized it yet and he saw a very small smile on her lips.

One guard was walking toward Fitz and the other one was already binding Jemma's hands behind her back. The burly goon kneeled in front of her to unshackle her and she stayed very still, giving them no reason to suspect anything was about to happen.

Fitz's guard had just circled behind the table and was roughly pulling Fitz's arms behind his back when there was a loud, destructive-sounding noise in a nearby room. 

Ward took Jemma by the shoulder and motioned for Jemma's guard to check out the noise. "Hurry up, get him restrained," Ward barked, and Fitz's guard fumbled with the bindings in his haste.

Fitz decided it was time to take a chance and he threw his body weight forward. The guard was pulled forward as Fitz tore out of the man's grasp, just as Fitz had hoped. He followed up by throwing his head back as hard as he could, cracking the back of his skull into the man's nose. The impact was strong enough to blur Fitz's vision for a moment as the guard crumpled to the ground.

After that, everything seemed to happen at once. A hole appeared in the wall to Fitz's left and Mack came through the dust and rubble, his gun leveled at the room ahead of him. Fitz whirled around to see Ward struggling with Jemma. She was putting up enough of a fight that he couldn't keep his grasp on her and get to the gun in the holster on his back, and the sudden entry of the S.H.I.E.L.D. extraction team was enough of a distraction that she was able to pull free and run for cover.

Fitz saw the injector lying on the ground near Ward's feet and he sprinted over to it, sliding and reaching his hand out to grab it before it was destroyed or anyone else got to it. He heard Jemma scream his name but he kept moving, knowing she would be angry with him but he couldn't let this opportunity go.

As Daisy came through the jagged opening in the wall, Fitz wrestled Ward to the ground and pushed the injector into Ward's arm, hitting the button that would push the solution Jemma had prepared into his body.

Ward scrambled to his feet and held his hands up, indicating surrender.

"Didn't know you had it in you, Fitz. Did you just kill me?" Ward asked.

"No, I just wanted you to know that what we gave you doesn't work. There's no reason to try to replicate our work if you manage to escape," Fitz spat at him, throwing the now-useless injector to the ground.

Ward eyed the door and glanced quickly at Daisy and Mack, apparently deciding he'd take his chances trying to get away rather than allow himself to be captured alive. Both of their answering shots went wide, bullets embedding in the wall near the door.

Daisy pulled out her comm and barked into it, "Mockingbird, package is on the move. Repeat, package is on the move."

Mack was already helping Jemma to her feet and Fitz joined Daisy near their entry point, then the four of them moved quickly through the path Daisy had cut through the building using her powers. The jet awaited them a short distance away and they climbed aboard. Fitz looked around, found Bobbi already there, but Hunter was missing.

"Hunter," Fitz said, looking to Bobbi for an answer.

"He's on Ward's tail," Bobbi said.

"Does he have a scanner with him?" Jemma asked, her tone sounding strained with the adrenaline that must be coursing through her system.

"You got a tracker on Ward?" Coulson asked.

"Fitz did," Jemma said. "Risking his life to do it in a rather reckless manner."

"Couldn't have done it if Jemma hadn't managed to sneak a tracker or two into the endovirus I injected into Ward." He saw the confused looks on most of the faces surrounding them, though Mack and Daisy seemed to have an idea what might have happened based on what they'd seen during the rescue.

"Ward forced us to engineer an endovirus and injector as a test to see if he could make us work for him," Jemma explained.

"But Jemma was smart enough to tip me off, let me know there was a way to make the virus inert if I constructed the injector with a flaw," Fitz said, taking over the explanation. "Then I realized she would have slipped a tracker into the endovirus solution if she'd gotten any opportunity at all to do it—"

"Which I had," Jemma interjected.

"So I injected Ward with the solution before we got away. The endovirus was destroyed before that so it won't kill him, but it did deliver the tracker," Fitz explained.

Fitz took the jump seat next to Jemma and grabbed her hand after they were both strapped in. He tried to put his worry for Hunter out of his mind and concentrate on what they'd accomplished that day, which was hopefully enough to take the target off of their backs. He couldn't quite forget they weren't all headed back to the base yet, and he found himself stealing a glance at Bobbi to try to read whether she was secretly worried for her ex-husband or not.

"He'll be all right," Bobbi told Fitz, correctly guessing the reason that Fitz kept looking at her. "Hunter can take care of himself. He's going to follow Ward until he gets some kind of intel on their base of operations. We put up a good chase," Bobbi told the group, once she noticed all of them, not just Fitz, were listening to her. "Ward will believe we were really trying to cut off his escape. He'll feel lucky to have gotten away and he'll go home to lick his wounds."

Truth be told, Fitz didn't really relax until a thoroughly exhausted, yet still obnoxiously cocky Hunter dragged himself back to base in a 'borrowed' SUV half a day later, bringing with him plenty of recon on Ward and Hydra. Only then, did Fitz consider the mission an unqualified success.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last "real" chapter. Epilogue coming up. Did not end with the line I planned to use. Guess I'll have to write something else to use it!


	10. Epilogue

"Jemma Simmons," Fitz said, trying to get her to look up from the project she was currently engrossed in. "I'm going to keep saying your name until you look up, you may as well just do it now," he warned, grinning when she sighed deeply and removed her lab goggles.

"Yes, Leopold Fitz?" she answered, matching his oddly goofy formality, smiling back at him.

"I'd like to invite you to dinner in my quarters this evening," he said, enjoying the look of confusion that passed over her face.

"Our quarters, you mean?" she clarified.

Fitz shook his head. "No, I thought we'd eat in my quarters. My old quarters." He'd already snuck into the now unassigned room that had once been his quarters and pulled the desk out from the wall just as he had a year before. Dinner from the same take-away restaurant he'd gone to for their first dinner after Jemma returned all those months ago was already there, getting cold as Jemma continued to barrage him with questions.

"I...suppose," she said, still seeming a little distracted. "Oh! Do you mean right now?"

Fitz nodded. "Do you still have that dress? You know the one. It has the zipper in the back," he said, a vivid memory of watching it fall to the ground at her feet the night they reconciled flashing through his mind.

She gave him a quiet smile. "I know the one you mean. I can go change clothes if you'd like."

"I'll be in my quarters," he said over his shoulder, heading to his old room. On the way, he wondered if it had somehow escaped her notice that exactly one year had passed since Ward's threat had brought her back to S.H.I.E.L.D. He tried not to be bothered by the idea, remembering how she could get tunnel vision while working on a project that really engaged her.

She arrived a few minutes after he did, wearing the same dress she had when she'd come nervously to this same room a year ago to have dinner with him. He smiled when he saw the recognition on her face, and even if she hadn't remembered before then, the arrangement of furniture in the room and his request for her to wear this dress was enough to remind her.

"Fitz! It's the same food as well," she cried, and he smiled as he emptied the take-away containers onto plates, his back to her. "What I didn't mention a year ago," she began, and he smiled wider, realizing she'd remembered the significance of this day as well, "was how uncomfortable this dress is."

He heard a zipper and he spun around, his eyes catching on her just as the dress slipped off her shoulders and hit the floor. She was wearing the same peach lingerie underneath he remembered from a year ago, looking even more breathtaking than the first time he'd seen her this way.

"Shall we eat?" she asked, her tone full of innocence. 

"Eventually," he answered, taking her hand and pulling her to the bed, where they forgot all about dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're still reading to this point, thank you SO MUCH! :)


End file.
